Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke’s queer cowboy movie gets Cannes premiere

Pedro Almodovar's Strange Way of Life is headed to the Cannes Film Festival.

Hawke will play a sheriff named Jake while Pascal is a gunslinger called Silva. The pair live on opposite sides of the desert and haven't seen each other for 25 years – when they both worked as hired gunmen. In the 30-minute English-language film, Silva rides a horse across a desert to Bitter Creek to visit Sheriff Jake. Silva tells him that he's there to rekindle their friendship, but Jake knows it's something much more.

Almodovar, who was initially attached to direct Brokeback Mountain, calls Strange Way of Life his "answer" to the film as well as the queer western genre.

"One of them travels through the desert to find the other," Almodóvar explained. "There will be a showdown between them, but really the story is very intimate." When asked if romance could be on the cards, he said: "You can guess," Almodovar previously told IndieWire. "I mean, masculinity is one of the subjects of the movie."

"It's a queer Western, in the sense that there are two men and they love each other. It's about masculinity in a deep sense because the Western is a male genre," the filmmaker explained on Dua Lipa's At Your Service podcast (via The Gay Times).

Strange Way of Life will premiere in May at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. For more, check out our list of all the exciting upcoming movies in 2023 and beyond, or, skip right to the good stuff with our list of movie release dates.