When George Gountas, a Brooklyn dad, won a year’s worth of free burritos in a Pedro Pascal lookalike competition, few figured he’d be on The Daily Show less than 24 hours later.
However, it soon turned out that Gountas, in fact, worked at The Daily Show as a lighting designer, or as one of his colleagues called him when he went to work on Monday morning, the “new Hawk Tuah girl”.
After an emotional episode covering the latest political news and an unhinged interview with John Mulaney, Stewart featured Gountas on After The Cut, one of the Comedy Central show’s digital extensions.
Gountas revealed that it was Daily Show stage manager Tyler Goldman who first suggested that he should enter and after a little help from a stylist who lives in his building, he “rolled up and they said ‘You’re going to win’.”
“This is crazy. Woman are, as you can see, reacting quite frankly animalistically, and some of the men,” Stewart said.
What does Gountas’s wife think of the situation? “Her position is that ‘I’m cool with you getting all of this attention if I can meet Pedro Pascal’.
After looking into camera three (“I know how this works”), Gountas added, “‘Hey Pedro, this is Pedro #5 from New York, it would be a great, great gift if you could meet my wife Jenny, it would mean the world to her, we need to make this happen’,” he said.
“I don’t see how Pedro #1 can turn down Pedro #5,” said Stewart, before calling him a “brilliantly talented” lighting designer. “You should see what I look like without his lighting, it’s some crypt keeper shit,” the host added.
