Sarah Paulson revealed how she was able to help Pedro Pascal early in his career. In a new Esquire cover story, Paulson explained how she financially supported Pascal in the early 2000s while before his career took off. Paulson said that she gave Pascal money as part of her acting per diem so that he could feed himself.

The two actors first met in 1993 when Pascal came to New York City as a student at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

“We would go to see movies all the time in those years,” Paulson said, “and we would get so lost in them. You can fill in the blanks about the why of that however you like, but I think there were things we wanted to escape mentally, emotionally, spiritually.”

After college, Pascal began looking for his big break and moved to Los Angeles. When in L.A., Pascal worked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Touched by an Angel, and Undressed, but the work was not enough to keep his bills paid. He eventually moved back to New York City and tried again in 2000.

“He’s talked about this publicly, but there were times when I would give him my per diem from a job I was working on so that he could have money to feed himself,” Paulson told the publication.

“I died so many deaths,” Pascal said about this period of his life. “My vision of it was that if I didn’t have some major exposure by the time I was 29 years old, it was over, so I was constantly readjusting what it meant to commit my life to this profession, and giving up the idea of it looking like I thought it would when I was a kid. There were so many good reasons to let that delusion go.”

Now, Paulson is ecstatic about how far Pascal has come and that everyone “wants a piece” of him. He’s made quite a career of himself by landing two huge television series, HBO’s The Last of Us and Disney’s The Mandalorian.