A summer or two ago, at Pedro Almodovar’s house, while Melina Smit’s sister and nephew were swimming in his pool, the young actress suddenly found herself sitting alone with the host.
In the middle of his evening, the Spaniard snuck away from the other guests to tell Smit some exciting news. “he [said]“I have a character for you in my new movie,” Smit recalls. “He said, ‘I wrote this character especially for you, inspired by you, by the tone of your voice, by how you walk,’” Smit recalls. [how you] She continues to breathe. “I was in shock. I was like, ‘I’m in a dream!’”
It wasn’t a dream. The 29-year-old Smit fell into this business completely by accident. While working as a model in Madrid, she was on the casting team for the 2020 thriller film directed by David Victory Cross the line It happened on her Instagram and she was asked to join the Mario Casas-starrer movie. Her performance caught the attention of a certain cult director, who would then make Smit a co-lead in the 2021 Oscar-nominated film. Parallel mothersOpposite Penelope Cruz. This would be the beginning of a great artistic friendship, after Smit managed to pick her jaw up from the ground.
A few years later, the former model and Goya Award nominee is admittedly no closer to understanding the relationship she had. “Pedro has this tenderness. He’s so sweet,” she says. Hollywood Reporter. “Parallel mothers It was my second film, and it was all in the beginning and a bit overwhelming. I think there are things now that are like, “How dare you do that?” She smiles. “I’m so happy and so proud of myself when I was younger.”
Elche-born Smit admits that her teenage years were not very wise. “I was very lost before I did this, because I didn’t have a career. When I was 18, none of my decisions were the right ones,” she recalls, laughing, of discovering her desire to act in her twenties. However, the choices she has made have now placed her at the forefront of Almodóvar’s 24th feature film, Amarga Navidad (Bitter Christmas). It will undoubtedly be another hit at Cannes for the Spanish showbiz sage.
There’s a fair amount of meta-narrative going on Bitter Christmas. The film – as vibrant and sharp as his first English-language project, 2024 Next room The film revolves around Elsa (Barbara Linney), an advertising executive who suffers from migraines and struggles to deal with the death of her mother. We also follow Raul (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a famous director who has been rejuvenated by the completion of his next script. Among these concurrent stories comes Natalia, played by Smit, Elsa’s friend who is haunted by the sudden death of her young son.
“She’s in a lot of pain,” Smit begins, talking about the character written for her. “But we wanted to keep that pain inside. It’s something you don’t want to show, but it’s a mirror. You can’t escape it.” There’s a particularly tragic scene in which Natalia, lured by Elsa on vacation, discovers a little boy laughing innocently at the table across from her during dinner. “I was thinking: I don’t want anyone in this restaurant to see me cry.” “There’s a lot of shame,” she says of Natalia’s grief. “That moment, for me, was the perfect moment to do something deeper and deeper than that [just] crying.”
Of course, at this point in her career — and with no formal acting training under her belt — every set is still a learning experience. “Pedro gives you a full day to shoot one scene, which means you really have a lot of time to develop the moment,” Smit continues of watching her friend at work. “He has energy all the way to the end of the day.” She laughs again. “He’s not old, but he’s a man of a certain age. And you’re surprised when it’s three o’clock in the morning, and we’re at the end of filming, and everyone has run out of energy, and everyone is yawning, and he’s still going!”
Smit describes her premiere at the Cannes Film Festival as an evening she will greet with childlike wonder. It’s not a career she’s keen to perfect – “sometimes I’m tired, sometimes I want to finish a particular shoot” – but after a short while, “I fall in love again”.
On the horizon for this accidentally active actress is the Spanish West Trinidad With Gabriela Andrada and Carla Sofía Gascón, and narrating by Chloe Zhao Hamnet One of her films that would have been killed if she had been in the recently released films.
But Melina Smit will remain forever loyal to the first director to write a role just for her, who happens to be the famous and effortlessly brilliant Almodóvar. The thought of walking up to the palace hugging each other made her, well, still pinch herself: “It’s a beautiful part of my life; [having] This connection with him. “I learned a lot.”
