Actors Jose Condessa and Jason Fernandez preview their hot-and-heavy sequence in the Western short film from Pedro Almodovar.
He continues in Spanish for a moment, unaware that the interview will be conducted in English.
“Me oye bien?
(L to R) Manu Rios, Pedro Almodóvar, José Condessa, George Steane, Pedro Pascal, Jason Fernández, and Ethan Hawke of ‘Strange Way of Life’.Sony Pictures Classics
Se me ve rarisimo.
No se este ordenador se me ve raro.
No como un modo retrato,” he says.
Ethan Hawke, Pedro Pascal, and Pedro Almodóvar of ‘Strange Way of Life’.Sony Pictures Classics
Sorry," he says, flawlessly switching to an equally charming English accent.
“Me here speaking in Spanish.”
“It was literally a dream within a dream,” Fernandez tells EW of that experience.
“It was something that’s really indescribable.”
Condessa, a 26-year-old Portuguese actor, feels the same.
“I remembered that moment when I felt like, this is happening.
I’m here.”
In their youth as hired gunmen, the pair succumb to their sexual passion for each other.
Almodovar takes the iconography of the classic American Western and offers a new take.
“It’s a completely male genre,” the Oscar winner, 73, says generally of Westerns.
So, I tried to make something not new, not modern.
I didn’t want to make any anachronism.
Still, the actors underwent multiple rounds of auditions.
“This is: We want to see if you’ve got the option to act.
Condessa felt at ease with Fernandez in the face of such intimate material.
It’s not very common, but it was beautiful when it happened.”
The two actors took the task seriously.
“We had to deliver so much information without words,” Fernandez notes of the scene.
They don’t get to f—.
There was a moment when Condessa truly felt like he and his costar were taken seriously as actors.
He had an idea, a small tweak to the scene he thought of in the moment.
He began to express his thoughts but receded back into himself.
After all, it’s Almodovar.
“I don’t want to say something wrong,” Condessa exclaims.
The filmmaker eventually coaxed it out of him.
“It’s like a friendship,” he says.
“It’s something that they always are doing every day.”
Almodovar took to the idea and paused filming to incorporate the moment.
“It’s really cool because you feel like, I’m part of the movie.
I’m not just an actor.
I’m not just a stand-in,” Condessa adds.
Soon, the rest of the world will feel that too of both him and Fernandez.
