Meet the Hotties from Pedro Almodóvar's 'Strange Way of Life'

The first time the young cast members of Pedro Almodóvar's "Strange Way of Life" gathered in his office, he was gobsmacked. "I said, 'My God, you are so hot! All of you!' We all felt like the hunchback of Notre-Dame. When you see the young actors together, all of them, it's like a beauty contest," he told Vulture earlier this year when the film premiered at Cannes. "Some friends of mine afterward sent me a message: 'Pedro, this is like the cover of Playgirl.'"

With a mischievous grin, Almodóvar referred to the men as "beauties" but "also good actors," though he didn't reveal what they'd be doing in the film. "Approximately 31 minutes later, everyone in the audience was furiously Googling José Condessa, Jason Fernández, Manu Ríos, and George Steane," adds Vulture.

Save for Condessa, who is Portuguese, they're all up-and-coming Spanish actors and models. In the film "Condessa, 25, and Fernández, 28, play the younger versions of characters played in a later era by Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke, in a brief but erotically charged flashback to the gunslingers' youthful affair in Mexico," writes Vulture.

"Steane, 22, shows up in two scenes as Pascal's delinquent, on-the-lam son, who may or may not have murdered someone important to Hawke's character, who has grown up to be a sad, repressed sheriff. Ríos, 24, the most well known of the four thanks to a role on Netflix's Elite, plays a balladeer strumming the Spanish guitar."

"Strange Way of Life" comes to theaters for a limited release on October 4. The short (31 minute) film is paired with Almodóvar's first English language film, the equally brief "The Human Voice" with Tilda Swinton that was made during the Pandemic.

"Almodóvar cracks the whip and the whole thing rattles along like an episode of 'Bonanza' with more shots of bare bottoms," wrote Raphael Abraham in the Financial Times reviewing the film at Cannes. (Review behind a firewall.)

"And what a dream: the richly acted, sumptuously photographed 'Strange Way of Life' lives up to its title as a revisionist Western that embraces its classical genre roots while also carving out a very modern way of looking at the past."

Speaking to Vulture, the actors discussed the casting process. Jason Fernández said it started with a self-tape "and we didn't know who the director was. Then we got a 15-page script for the actual casting, and the casting directors rented out an Airbnb, which they don't normally do. And then we did three-hour casting, performing the first few scenes of the short film, where Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal spend the night together."

José Condessa said the reading "was incredible." Asked why, he responded. "I think because we didn't know each other. When the scene started rolling, it was the first time we got to know each other: the first look, the first words. For me, I looked at Jason, and I saw him: He was a humble and awesome guy. He instantly made me comfortable."

At the time, neither knew that Almodóvar was directing. Condessa learned first because he had to relocate to Madrid from Portugal, but Fernández didn't learn until a month later.