Do we like Pedro Almodóvar?
Our score: 9 out of 10. He has used his big awards speeches to stand up for trans people, migrants and the vulnerable, and the one mark against him is a shell company he called minor.
Almodóvar is the Spanish director who put drag queens, trans women and messy, funny, fierce women at the centre of mainstream cinema decades before it was fashionable. He turned 75 in 2024, and when he picked up a lifetime award in San Sebastián he said cinema had given him “everything”, much more than he could have imagined.
His upbringing explains a lot. He has told The Telegraph he is a firm non-believer, having rejected faith after a Catholic boarding school childhood, where pupils swapped accounts of alleged abuse by priests. He revisited that period in his 2004 film Bad Education, which is a long way from a bloke who's been quiet about it.
On the harm test, there's not much to find against him and a lot in his favour. Accepting the Chaplin Award in New York in April 2025, he dedicated it to trans actress Hunter Schafer, to the thousands of recently deported migrants and to Harvard. He said “Immigrants are not criminals” and rejected the idea that recognising only two genders changes human nature.
The same speech called Trump a “narcissistic, authoritarian lunatic”, which is the kind of line that costs you at the US box office. He has kept at it. At Cannes this year he wore a “Free Palestine” pin and said Europeans were obliged to become a shield against “monsters” like Trump, Netanyahu and the Russian leader. Where you land on that depends on whether you see it as a moral duty for artists or as grandstanding, but it is his own words and he owns them.
The one blemish is financial, not moral. In 2016 he and his producer brother Agustín were named in the Panama Papers leak, which reported they controlled a British Virgin Islands company from 1991. Agustín said it never became active, and Pedro told Cannes their names were “the least important” on the list and Spanish media had overplayed it. That is a long way short of a pattern, and no court outcome turned up.
The good stuff is mostly cultural, and it's big: a lifetime award at San Sebastián, the Chaplin Award in New York, and a career of giving trans and queer characters real depth. Nothing turned up on a charity or foundation, so we can't pad that list. What we can say is that he has used the biggest stages he gets to speak up for other people.