Strange Way of Life Trailer Blooms a Romance Between Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke in the Old West

The trailer was released for Strange way of life. Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival this year, the short comes from filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar (Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Talk to him) and the stars Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian, The last of us) And Ethan Hawke (moon knight, The man from the north) like two gunslingers falling in love in the Wild West. Preview images and a poster have already been released, and now the first footage from the film is here along with the new trailer. You can watch the video for the film, which will also be a MUBI release, below.

The short features Pascal as Silva, an armed bandit who travels across the desert to reunite with his old friend, Sheriff Jake (Hawke), after 25 years. While the new trailer teases some tension between the two when they meet, with Silva accusing Jake of “never liking anyone,” there are hints of how steamy things will get between them as well.

“Years ago you asked me what two men could do living together on a ranch. I’m going to answer you now,” Silva says of Pascal as he tends to an injured Sheriff Jake.

Strange way of life is partly a love story, but Almódovar wants people to know that it’s also very similar to classic Western films, sharing many of the same elements. The filmmaker says what really sets this short apart from the pack is mostly the dialogue, noting how different the words spoken by these characters are from what you’d see in any other film.

“It’s a queer western, in the sense that there are two men and they love each other,” he said on Dua Lipa. At your service podcast, according to the Gay Times. “It’s about deep masculinity because the western is a male genre. What I can tell you about the movie is that it has a lot of 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 movie has ever captured between two men.”

Related: Strange Way of Life: Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal Film in Spain on Western Gay Short

Strange Way of Life director turned down Brokeback Mountain

The short drew some comparisons to the 2003 film Brokeback Mountain because of his cowboy romance. Ang Lee directed this film, although Almodóvar first received the offer before turning it down. Almodóvar says that at that time he would have been too limited by the studio as to how he would want to approach such a project. This includes making the sex scenes more “animalistic”, perhaps teasing what we can expect from Strange way of lifewhere he had full creative control.

“I think Ang Lee made a wonderful movie, but I never believed they would give me complete freedom and independence to do whatever I wanted,” Almodóvar told IndieWire.

After the small screens in Cannes, Strange way of life will be distributed by MUBI in Italy and Latin America, while Pathé will be distributed in the UK. Information on a US release date has yet to be announced.