Gay Cowboy Film Starring Pedro Pascal And Ethan Hawke To Premiere At Cannes

A gay cowboy film  Strange Way of Life, starring Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke will premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Directed by gay Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, the 30-minute short film features Pascal, who plays a gunslinger that meets up with a sheriff (Hawke) who he hasn’t seen in decades. 

“Pedro Almodóvar will present his short film Strange Way of Life in world premiere at Cannes 2023 with Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal! The screening will be followed by a conversation with the filmmaking team,” Festival de Cannes announced on social media. 

The Last of Us star spoke about working with Almodóvar. “He absolutely opened up an entire world of storytelling, colour, culture, rebellion, and sexuality that was just absolutely intoxicating, dangerous, hilarious, heartbreaking, and encompassing the whole spectrum, but with such a signature style,” Pascal told Insider. 

Pascal described his experience of working with his co-star Ethan Hawke too, stating that being able to collaborate with someone “whose books I’ve read, whose plays I’ve seen him direct” was “incredible”. 

Almodóvar’s Answer To Brokeback Mountain

First poster for Pedro Almodóvar’s queer Western short ‘STRANGE WAY OF LIFE’, starring Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke. pic.twitter.com/M9BLnbfsGu

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) April 11, 2023

Almodóvar has described Strange Way of Life as his “answer to ‘Brokeback Mountain’,

Almodóvar was approached to direct the gay cowboy drama Brokeback Mountain in 2005, (which took three Academy Awards in the categories of Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Original Score), but turned down the project because he felt he wouldn’t have the complete freedom to enact his creative vision at the time. 

“I think Ang Lee made a wonderful movie, but I never believed that they would give me complete freedom and independence to make what I wanted. Nobody told me that — they said, ‘You can do whatever you want,’ but I knew that there was a limitation,” Almodóvar told IndieWire. 

“The relation between these two guys is animalistic. It was a physical relationship. The punch of the movie comes when they have to separate, and Heath Ledger discovers that he can’t think about leaving. That’s a strong discovery. But until that moment, it is animalistic, and for me, it was impossible to have that in the movie because it was a Hollywood movie. You could not have these two guys fucking all the time”, he added. 

Almodóvar explained that his latest film is a queer Western, “in the sense that there are two men and they love each other”, telling Dua Lipa on her podcast ‘Dua Lipa: At Your Service’ in December. 

“It’s about masculinity in a deep sense because the Western is a male genre.”

Almodóvar teased the film, adding that “One of them travels through the desert to find the other. There will be a showdown between them, but really the story is very intimate.”

“The strange way of life referred to in the title alludes to the famous fado by Amalia Rodrigues, whose lyrics suggest that there is no stranger existence than the one that is lived by turning your back on your own desires, Almdovor revealed in the film’s description