LONDON (UNITED KINGDOM)
The Telegraph [London, England]
August 28, 2026
By Benjamin Secher
Pedro Almodóvar does not look like a monster. When the 76-year-old master of Spanish cinema enters the library of the Soho Hotel in London, he is casually but stylishly turned out: his box-fresh shoes are Valentino; his crisp checked shirt, Louis Vuitton; his sculpted white hair, more Louis XV. For reasons that will become clear, he holds himself bolt upright, which gives him a distinctly stately bearing. Settling into a chair, removing his dark glasses and slipping a discreet hearing aid into his left ear (“my good ear”, as he calls it, such is the cruelty of age), he seems both approachable and unyielding, like a teddy bear cast in bronze.
Yet, as Bitter Christmas, his playful, Pirandellian new drama, reminds us, filmmakers are powerful and, potentially, treacherous creatures, however cuddly they may appear. “If you’re an authoritative person and on top of that you are a film director,” he warns now, speaking in great torrents of Spanish via an interpreter who sits between us, frantically typing away, “you can do truly terrible things.”
Almodóvar’s latest film, his 24th feature, includes many of his signature tropes: a grief-struck mother; a heartbreaking song that spurs a character into action; gorgeous, immaculately groomed individuals with exquisitely stylish homes and relatably messy emotional lives; and (as if to prove that the director hasn’t entirely outgrown his youthful naughtiness) a hunky, big-hearted fireman who moonlights as a male stripper. But it is far from the work of a director on autopilot. Indeed, at a point in his career when you might expect Almodóvar to be drifting into complacency, he goes farther than ever before (surpassing even 2019’s nakedly autobiographical Pain and Glory, about an ailing filmmaker played by Antonio Banderas) in questioning the very nature of artistic creation and the moral responsibilities that come with it.
He describes Bitter Christmas as “the story of a woman and also of the man who is writing her story, alternating between the two of them”. It depicts both the frustrations of Raúl Rossetti – a celebrated, ageing director who has “lost the spark” and is struggling to complete his latest, autofictional screenplay – and the story his unfinished screenplay tells, about a (female) filmmaker in crisis. In doing so, it holds an unforgiving mirror up to Almodóvar himself.
In one climactic scene, Raúl’s long-suffering assistant, Mónica, eviscerates him, accusing him of acting as an “emotional vampire” who uses the traumas of those close to him, herself included, as the lifeblood of his art. “Everything Mónica says to Raúl in that scene, everything she tells him to humiliate and ruin him, are accusations I could also put to myself,” admits Almodóvar. “That exercise in self‑criticism was very refreshing and even liberating.
“It also raised a question that interests me,” he continues, “about the right one has to use the lives of others for inspiration, in particular the dark and painful parts, which are always the most interesting bits. Although, legally speaking, there is no limit, whenever I’ve been inspired by something from other people’s lives, I’ve always taken care not to hurt them.” Having said that, he confesses, “When, as a filmmaker or writer, you find a powerful idea that is inspired by someone close to you, the power of that idea is such that you soon forget about the other person completely and can only think of finishing the story. In that sense, the creator is ultimately a very selfish person, and in some cases even a dangerous one.”
More than half a century has passed since Almodóvar, the son of a muleteer from rural La Mancha, decamped to Madrid in the dying days of General Franco’s oppressive regime, then proceeded to dance on the dictator’s grave with his transgressive visions of nymphomaniac punk singers, gay Middle Eastern princes, necrophiliac matadors and (in 1983’s Dark Habits) a heroin-snorting Mother Superior.
Even the wildest child is destined to grow up, and as Almodóvar left his youth behind, his output became more respectable, though no less distinctive, its keynote shifting from silliness to sobriety, earning him an international following, Academy Awards (the Best Foreign Film Oscar for All About My Mother in 2000 and Best Original Screenplay for Talk to Her three years later) and a deserved reputation as one of the world’s most accomplished filmmakers.
A decade ago, the director feared he may have reached the end of the road. As he was about to begin filming Julieta, his 2016 melodrama adapted from a trio of short stories by the Canadian Nobel Prize-winner Alice Munro, agonising back pain led to him undergoing “very serious surgery” that left parts of his spine permanently immobilised. “For three months afterwards, I could only be on my feet for half an hour at a time,” he says. “I was questioning whether I could still make films at all.” But, the moment he started shooting, he says, the pain vanished, “like a miracle”.
The lesson he took away from all this was one he had known all along: that film-making is his vocation. While doing it, “my passion is such that my brain is incapable of feeling anything else,” he concludes. “The solution is also the curse: I want to shoot films for the rest of my life.”
If this talk of passion and miracles seems to hint at the workings of a divine power, Almodóvar is quick to clarify that, having turned his back on God after his grim childhood experiences at a Catholic boarding school where the pupils would share stories of their abuse at the hands of the priests (a dark period to which he would return in his 2004 film Bad Education), he remains a firm non-believer. In recent years, the Catholic Church has undergone something of a reckoning; does he believe the day will come when the organisation is free of sexual predators?
“In Spain it doesn’t look like it will,” he says, without hesitation. “The issue of abuse is huge and yet, in this country, it remains a subject that the Church simply refuses to fully acknowledge or to act on.”
Almodóvar is also troubled by the close (though informal) relationship between the Church and Vox, the far-Right political party that has enjoyed a recent surge in popularity among Spanish voters. “Vox is talking about trying to erase from Spanish life many things that we have fought for – the right to abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, anti-racism [legislation] – and it has the full support of the Church.” He grimaces. “In Spain, the Church doesn’t live in the contemporary world.”
Over the past few years, the film industry has faced a reckoning of its own. Almodóvar has steered clear of the Hollywood machine throughout his career, turning down invitations to direct both Sister Act and Brokeback Mountain, and making all his films for the past 40 years under the banner of El Deseo, the Spanish production company he founded with his brother, Agustín, in 1986. He has nevertheless found himself rubbing shoulders with powerful figures whose behaviour would later come under scrutiny.
In 1990, he joined forces with Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax in a legal challenge to overturn the X-rating given in the United States to his film Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (a move which not only gave the title a welcome box-office boost, but also ultimately led to the creation of the NC-17 certificate).
Then, in 2009, he signed a petition demanding the release of Roman Polanski after the Polish director was jailed (on a 1977 warrant for statutory rape in the US) upon his arrival in Zurich, where he was due to receive an award at the Swiss city’s annual film festival. Some of his fellow signatories, including actresses Emma Thompson and Natalie Portman, later withdrew their names from the list. Does Almodóvar regret his decision?
“At that time, I was not yet conscious of the abundance of abuses in the film industry,” he says, pointing out that the petition pre-dated the #MeToo movement. “And it seemed to me that this was a trap that had been set for Polanski; that he was being given an honorary award just so that he could be arrested. That’s why I signed the petition. At that moment I was thinking only of the artist.”
Almodóvar pauses, to allow the interpreter to catch up. “Talking of filmmakers who have run into trouble decades after the fact,” he continues: “Bernardo Bertolucci was a friend of mine, and it made me very sad that in the last two or three years of his life he was so cruelly attacked because of the Maria Schneider case.”
In the most notorious scene of Bertolucci’s 1972 erotic thriller Last Tango in Paris, an American hotelier played by Marlon Brando is shown raping a young French woman (Schneider), using butter as a makeshift lubricant. Decades later, the actress would tell a journalist she had been unprepared for the scene and felt “a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci”.
In a filmed interview given in 2013, two years after Schneider’s death, the Italian director admitted that the butter was “an idea that I had with Marlon in the morning before shooting it but… I didn’t tell her what was going on because… I wanted Maria to feel not to act the rage and the humiliation”. When the interview resurfaced on YouTube three years later, it belatedly went viral, drawing outraged tweets from stars including Jessica Chastain (“I feel sick”) and Captain America actor Chris Evans (“I will never look at this film, Brando or Bertolucci in the same way again”), and reigniting a fire that would continue to torch Bertolucci’s reputation until his death in 2018.
At the end of the video interview, Bertolucci is asked whether he regrets the way he shot the rape scene. “I feel guilty,” he says, “but I do not regret it.” Almodóvar sympathises. “I’m not saying I think what he did with Maria Schneider was OK,” he says. “But sometimes when a director wants to achieve something – in this case, a genuine look of surprise and horror – he puts it above everything else, including the performer. That is the nature of the work, even if morally it’s very wrong.”
During the Covid pandemic, Almodóvar wrote an entertaining series of diaries for Sight and Sound magazine, including one in which he explained how a lockdown viewing of Goldfinger had stirred memories of a phone call from Sean Connery, eager to congratulate him on Talk to Her (2002). “Hearing him talking about my film left me overwhelmed,” he wrote. “As did listening to his deep voice, that of a good actor and an attractive man.”
Since the Spaniard is both an unexpected fan of British cinema’s most enduring alpha male and a likely repository of industry gossip, I invite him to speculate on who will be cast as the next James Bond. “I heard that it might be Tom Hiddleston,” he says, naming a former frontrunner who, at 45, is now widely considered too old for the part. “But I also heard the names of actresses. It’s not crazy to think that James Bond could be a woman.” Would that please him? “Yes, there are some actresses that could absolutely do it; Anya Taylor-Joy for example, can do action, she would be good. I’m very faithful to James Bond, but it seems to me that now is the moment to make a fundamental change.”
He is keen to know which other names I’ve heard, so I mention current bookies’ favourite Callum Turner. “Ah yes,” he says, his face lighting up. “He is a hot boy”. I also bring up Jack Lowden, the similarly heavily tipped star of Slow Horses, and he frowns like a diner who had ordered beef and been served chicken. “I think Callum Turner would be a better choice.” In fact, he says, he met Turner a few years ago after an introduction from the pop star Dua Lipa, a friend of Almodóvar’s and, since their blow-out Sicilian wedding this summer, Turner’s wife. “He is good-looking but in a very original way, which is exactly what you want for James Bond.”
Then, having bestowed his blessing, he gets to his feet. The hearing aid is returned to its case, the shades go back on and, with a gentle smile, Almodóvar, movie monster, exits the room.
Bitter Christmas is in cinemas from Aug 28