One or two summers ago, at Pedro Almodóvar’s house, while Milena Smit’s sister and nephew swam in his pool, the young actress suddenly found herself sitting alone with the host.

In the middle of his soiree, the Spaniard had crept away from the other guests to tell Smit some exciting news. “He [said], ‘I have a character in my new film for you,’ ” Smit remembers. “He told me, ‘I wrote this character especially for you, inspired by you, your tone of voice, how you walk, [how you] breathe,’ ” she continues. “I was in shock. I said, ‘I’m in a dream!’ ”

It was no dream. The 29-year-old Smit fell into this business entirely by chance. While working as a model in Madrid, the casting team for David Victori’s 2020 thriller Cross the Line happened upon her Instagram and asked that she join the Mario Casas-starrer. Her performance caught the attention of a certain cult director, who would then make Smit a co-lead in 2021’s Oscar-nominated Parallel Mothers, opposite Penélope Cruz. It would be the beginning of a great artistic friendship — after Smit had retrieved her jaw from the floor.

A few years later, the former model and Goya Award nominee is admittedly no closer to comprehending the relationship they’ve struck up. “Pedro has this tenderness. He’s so kind,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Parallel Mothers was my second film, and it was all beginning and a little bit overwhelming. There are things that now, I think, ‘How did I dare to do that?’ ” she smiles. “I’m so happy and so proud of my younger self.”

The Elche-born Smit confesses that her teenage years were not marked by wisdom. “I was so lost before doing this, because I don’t have any vocation. At 18, none of my decisions would have been the right decision,” she recalls with a laugh about unearthing a desire to act in her 20s. The choices she went on to make have now, however, brought her to the forefront of Almodóvar’s 24th feature film, Amarga Navidad (Bitter Christmas). It’ll no doubt be another Cannes hit for the Spanish showbiz sage.

There’s a fair bit of meta storytelling going on in Bitter Christmas. The film — as vibrant and sharp as his first English-language project, 2024’s The Room Next Door — revolves around Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), a migraine-ridden advertising executive struggling to process the death of her mother. We also follow Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a celebrated filmmaker rejuvenated by the realization of his next script. In among these concurrent stories comes Natalia, played by Smit, a friend of Elsa’s haunted by the sudden death of her young son.

“She’s so, so, so in pain,” begins Smit about the character written for her. “But we wanted to keep this pain on the 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 where Natalia, lured on holiday by Elsa, spots a small child innocently giggling at the table across from her at dinner. “I was thinking, ‘I don’t want anybody in this restaurant to see me crying.’ There is so much shame,” she says about Natalia’s grief. “That moment, for me, was the perfect moment to do something more profound, more deep, than [just] crying.”

Of course, at this stage in her career — and with no formal acting training under her belt — every set is still a learning experience. “Pedro gives you a whole day to shoot one sequence, which means that you really have a lot of time to develop the moment,” continues Smit about witnessing her friend at work. “He has energy all the way to the end of the day.” She laughs again. “He’s not so old, but he is a man of a certain age. And you are surprised when it’s 3 a.m., we’re at the end of the shoot, and everybody’s out of energy, everybody’s yawning, and he’s still going!”

Smit describes her first Cannes Film Festival premiere as an evening she’ll approach with childlike wonder. It’s not a profession she’s keen to idealize — “sometimes I’m tired, sometimes I want a particular shoot to end” — but, after a little while, “I fall back in love again.”

Up on the horizon for this accidentally active actress is Spanish Western Trinidad with Gabriela Andrada and Karla Sofía Gascón, and the starlet lists Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet among her would-have-killed-to-have-been-in films released recently.

But Milena Smit will remain forever loyal to the first director to write a role just for her, who just so happens to be the acclaimed, effortlessly cool Almodóvar. The thought of walking up the Palais steps arm in arm together has her, well, still pinching herself: “It’s a beautiful part of my life, [having] this connection with him. I’ve learned so much.”