It is a banality to find meaning in images. We pretend it’s passive—this looking, this absorbing—but really it’s a quiet sport of projection, a way of testing the boundaries between what the world shows us and what we secretly hope it contains. One cannot help but acknowledge that gap, the one between seeing and understanding, while sitting with Sølve Sundsbø’s Elements, the 2026 Pirelli Calendar unveiled in Prague but vibrating far beyond its coordinates. It isn’t a calendar so much as an experiment in perception—a suggestion that the natural world, with all its unruly matter and mythologies, might be best approached through metaphor rather than geography.

In Sundsbø’s hands, earth, air, fire, water, and their more spectral siblings—light, ether, energy—cease behaving like classical elements and instead drift toward emotional states, the kinds that hover under the skin before language can claim them. He harvests sunsets, cloudbanks, and flickers of flame, then reanimates them on towering LED walls in London and New York, inviting his subjects to step into their own internal landscapes. The women who anchor Elements—Tilda Swinton, FKA twigs, Venus Williams, Susie Cave, Eva Herzigová, and more—do not pose so much as inhabit their weather.

And somewhere in that alchemy lives Gwendoline Christie, the actress whose physical presence often reads like a force field, yet who stuns an almost secret softness to Sundsbø’s universe. In the conversation that follows, Christie and Sundsbø open up the process—its trust, its strangeness, its quiet ambitions—and, in doing so, reveal that looking is never just looking. It’s an invitation, a negotiation, a brief surrender to the elements inside and around us.

In the conversation below, Sundsbø and Christie speak to creation, collaboration, and the emotional charge of embodying something larger than oneself. Together, they illuminate the alchemy behind Elements—a reminder that beauty, at her most resonant, is both a mystery and a mirror.

The 2026 Pirelli Calendar anchors itself in the Elements theme, which feels inherently connected to nature and the outdoors. What inspired your decision to interpret that theme within a studio setting instead?

Sundsbø: So, I wanted to work with nature, but I wanted to work with nature in an abstract form, so it wasn't, you know, just going out into nature and people in nature. And then an early way of trying to understand nature was by reducing it down to its core components. So the only way of saying that was that the four elements later became 5,12, it depends on which culture you're looking at. But it was basically about reducing nature into something that you can actually photograph inside. So it's about abstracting it perfectly.

You’re celebrated for your versatility and fearlessness in terms of style and the tools you are willing to use to execute a vision—I read that this year’s calendar will include moving imagery alongside the classic still portraits, and I’m wondering what drew you towards that addition?

Sundsbø: I think that the beauty of the Pirelli calendar is always the fact that they make an object. They make a true physical calendar. But with the modern times, it's also existing in a digital space online. And I think that film might be a more successful media for moving images for the internet. So they wanted to make a film as well. And, so we basically made a movie version of the calendar for the internet. It's about communication. I think it works well. It works well on the internet.

What made you want to be part of this year's Pirelli calendar?

Christie: I wouldn't want to be part of this year's Pirelli calendar? The Pirelli calendar is something that has been resonant throughout my life—and I think everybody's life. It is legendary. It is a window into beauty each year. Perceptions of beauty are notions of what is powerful and beautiful, and also, it's lensed to always by such significant photographers. We've had people like Terence Donovan, Richard Avedon, and Prince Gyasi, and reason why I was so enthused about it was that I love working with Sølve, and I always feel that he sees something else in me, a different kind of look, a different feeling, a different energy. So when he asked me to be ether, I was intrigued because I didn't necessarily know quite what that was, and that facilitated its own creative journey. I knew I wanted to do something new, I wanted it to be impactful. But I didn't realize that how it would be impactful would be through its intimacy and quietness, rather than something very physical. I think its power comes through the energetic exchange. So, representing ether as a person, is very intriguing.

Out of all the characters you’ve portrayed throughout your career, dare I say that “ether” is the most nebulous of them all? How did it feel to represent not a person, but something inanimate and elemental, almost cryptic?

Christie: I have played a lot of characters that look extremely defined, and certainly, I work very hard on making those characters defined. What's exciting about portraying something nebulous is that it requires a degree of honesty. You have to decide as the subject in that moment, in your relationship with Sølve at that second that he's photographing you, you have to decide who you are, what energetic factors you're bringing to the forefront, how you are going to reveal yourself in that moment. And the very idea of portraying something that connects everything around us was exciting, because the idea of worldwide connectivity gives me a great sense of hope.