Trans actress Lux Pascal will star in an upcoming literary thriller

A mere month after the internet fell in love with Pedro Pascal’s sister Lux, the Chilean actress is starring in upcoming thriller Summer War. After starring alongside her brother in Netflix’s Narcos, this will be Lux’s first feature film role since coming out as trans.

While Lux’s role is still unspecified, the film follows “a US champion of The Third Reich whose peaceful summer holiday in 1989 is shattered when a tourist mysteriously disappears at sea,” according to Screen Daily. 

Summer War is based on The Third Reich by acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, the details of which give us a little more insight into the potential film plot. The novel, which was written in 1989 and published in 2010 after being discovered among the late author’s papers, concerns a real-life board game Rise and Decline of the Third Reich.

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In this version, the champion is a German and he arrives at a small town on the Costa Brava in Spain with his girlfriend. When one of his friends disappears, he challenges a stranger to the board game in order to unveil the mystery.

The film is helmed by Chilean director Alicia Scherson, who previously adapted Bolaño’s novel Una novelita lumpen into 2013’s Il Futuro. Summer War also stars Dan Beirne, Aline Küppenheim, Agustín Pardella and Malena Sánchez.

In addition to Narcos, Lux’s most recent big screen roles were three Chilean films in 2019, including queer film El Principe, No quiero ser tu hermano, and Ella es Cristina. In 2021, she came out as trans, and in early 2024, she broke the internet when she attended the Emmys with Pedro.

During her initial coming out, she described her supportive relationship with brother in an interview with Spanish-language magazine Ya. “[Pedro] has been an important part of this. He’s also an artist and has served as a guide for me,” she said. “He was one of the first people to gift me the tools that started shaping my identity.”

Pedro in turn told Esquire last year, “She is and has always been one of the most powerful people and personalities I’ve ever known. My protective side is lethal, but I need her more than she needs me.”

Production on Summer War will kick off (when else?) in summer.