“One of my biggest influences”: the director Pedro Pascal waited his entire career to work with
There is perhaps no director with a style as wonderfully chaotic as Pedro Almodóvar, with the quintessential madness of life seeping into every frame along with vibrant pops of colour and often, very unhinged women.
In recent years, many audiences have come to love the genre of unconventional women behaving in bizarre and sometimes criminal ways, whether it be the cool girl monologue in Gone Girl, in which Rosamund Pike explains her motives for faking her own disappearance, or the wry humour of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. But while women often write these characters, Almodóvar always showed a fascination for the interior worlds of similarly strange women, a quality loved by none other than Pedro Pascal.
Pascal’s star power has soared to staggering new heights in recent years, with the actor starting out with smaller roles in shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer before finding bigger success through his part in Game of Thrones. However, after this point, his career seemed relatively stagnant, which all changed after his monumental performance in HBO’s adaptation of the popular zombie video game, The Last of Us.
From this point onwards, his career exploded in new directions, with the actor collaborating with Ari Aster, Celine Song and Ridley Scott in this new phase of his career. However, perhaps one of the most exciting collaborations came in the form of a short film with Ethan Hawke, in which the pair starred in a gay cowboy romance directed by Almodóvar.
Strange Way of Life was not just a project to Pascal, it was an opportunity he had been waiting for nearly his whole life after falling in love with Almodóvar’s titular film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. It is a completely unhinged and delightfully manic story, following a woman who tries to kill herself after a gnarly relationship, but finds her plans being thwarted by a chaotic chain of events that is sparked after she laces her gazpacho with sleeping pills.
It is a cult classic film that remains a staple within his filmography, and one that made quite the impression on Pascal upon its release, with the actor saying, “He was one of my biggest influences when I got a little older. I remember seeing Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown as a teenager with my family as a kid. He’s one of my family’s most beloved filmmakers. So it was an opportunity to get to work with one of, if not my favourite, filmmakers. Anything that he does, whether it’s more dramatic, comedic, or thriller, is very personal to him”.
Almodóvar is known for his use of melodrama in everyday situations, creating epic stories that often chart the misfortunes and struggles of women, whether it be through comedy or something more serious. While each of his films vastly differs in tone, with the likes of Pain and Glory and All About My Mother adopting a more melancholic and nostalgic mood, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is one of his most beloved for a reason, with the misadventures of these unsuspecting women sticking out as one of the more chaotic from his filmography.
As a result, it comes as no surprise that Pascal was drawn to his work for this reason, with Strange Way of Life being a project that was a long time in the making.
