Pedro Pascal, Ethan Hawke Play Gunslingers Tangled in a Tortured Romance in ‘Strange Way of Life’

Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal play a sheriff and a cowboy caught in a tangled, tortured, Wild West romance in the new trailer for Pedro Almodóvar’s upcoming short film, Strange Way of Life. The 30-minute film will premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. 

In the short, Pascal plays a cowboy named Silva who treks across the desert to a place called “Bitter Creek,” where he reunites with his old friend/likely lover, Sheriff Jake (Hawke), after 25 years. Though that reunion is momentous, there’s another reason Sheriff Jake has called on Silva — to help him investigate the murder of a woman in town. 

The new trailer is filled with classic Western tropes, which Almodóvar has punched up and shot through with his distinct style. There’s lots of blood, dust, and fraught horniness, all of which reaches a climax when Silva snaps at Sheriff Jake, “You never loved me, you never loved anyone in your life!” This prompts Jake to pull his gun and spit back, “Don’t say that.”

Strange Way of Life is, in some ways, a full-circle moment for Almodóvar, who had the chance to direct Brokeback Mountain in the mid-2000s but turned it down because he didn’t think Hollywood would let him make the kind of movie he wanted to make. As he put it to IndieWire last year, “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.” 

In that same interview, Almodóvar acknowledged that Strange Way of Life “could be like my answer to Brokeback Mountain,” adding, “There will be a showdown between them, but really the story is very intimate.”