Pedro Pascal is having a career year in 2023 with HBO‘s “The Last Of Us” and the return of “The Mandalorian” on Disney+ for its third season. But the year isn’t even a quarter of the way over, and up next, the actor may have his most intriguing project of 2023 yet. He stars alongside Ethan Hawke in Pedro Almodóvar‘s short “Strange Way Of Life,” set for a world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
Almodóvar’s half-hour short sees the director tackle the Western genre in his distinctive way. In “Strange Way Of Life,” Pascal and Hawke play two retired gunslingers who meet up after years apart to rekindle their old friendship that may have a romantic sentiment to it. “I asked Pedro to play someone solid, emotional, crafty, a cheat if necessary, warmhearted,” Almodóvar told Esquire for a new feature on Pascal. “And he played all those nuances with incredible ease. He can be adorably sentimental and hard as nails. He’s a great comic actor, and he can also be impenetrable if necessary.”
Working with Almodóvar was a dream come true for Pascal, who’s long considered the writer-director one of his favorite filmmakers. Out Magazine (via Insider) reports that Pascal loved Almodóvar’s sensibility about making a queer Western. “He absolutely opened up an entire world of storytelling, color, culture, rebellion, and sexuality that was just absolutely intoxicating, dangerous, hilarious, heartbreaking, and encompassing the whole spectrum, but with such a signature style,” Pascal said about working on the short. “It could have been anything that he asked me to do, and I would have done it without question.”
Gay Times reports that Almodóvar spoke about “Strange Way Of Life” on Dua Lipa‘s “At Your Service” podcast last December. “It’s a queer Western, in the sense that there are two men and they love each other,” the director explained. “It’s about masculinity in a deep sense because the Western is a male genre. What I can tell you about the film is that it has a lot of the elements of the Western. It has the gunslinger, it has the ranch, it has the sheriff, but what it has that most Westerns don’t have is the kind of dialogue that I don’t think a Western film has ever captured between two men.” Almodóvar also added that the film is “something very different” for him artistically: “I mean, it’s another genre that I’ve never done before.”
So one might interpret that “Strange Way Of Life” may be Almodóvar’s response to Ang Lee‘s 2005 film “Brokeback Mountain,” a movie Almodóvar was once set to direct. More info about the short will undoubtedly be available once the Cannes Film Festival announces its lineup in a couple of days on April 13. But be sure that “Strange Way Of Life” already has a lot of buzz heading into next month’s premiere, and not just because it’s Pedro Pascal’s next project.
