Tilda Swinton on her role as a dying writer in Pedro Almodovar’s ‘The Room Next Door’: “It was written for my wiring”

“I am still pinching myself,” says Tilda Swinton about working with Pedro Almodovar. “It never occurred to me that we could work together because he was so clearly devoted to making films in Spanish about the Spanish landscape. Making a film in English was such a step for him, but now I think he could make a film in Farsi or Hungarian because what’s become clear is that it’s Almodo­varian, so it doesn’t matter what language it’s in.”

That collaboration has now happened twice – first with 2020 short The Human Voice about a desperate jilted woman, and now with The Room Next Door, which won the Golden Lion at Venice. Swinton plays Martha, a war correspondent dying of cancer, who asks her estranged friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore) to be her companion when she ends her life. Voters in the European Film Awards rewarded Swinton with a best European actress nomination (losing out to Karla Sofia Gascon for Emilia Pérez).

Swinton first encountered the films of Almodovar at the beginning of her career, when she saw 1988’s Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown.

“I had a feeling it was a portal to a world,” she says. “I sometimes think of his work as one book and each film is a chapter – the way he develops his themes and enquiries from project to project. That panoply aspect is what I’m interested in working in cinema for, that wide view and particular voice.”

Swinton does not like talking about character, but concedes The Room Next Door offered her a new opportunity. While her roles are often very far removed from herself, Martha is close to home.

“I’ve been working a lot with a kind of mask recently, and so I’ve become interested in a different way of working, more molecular and closer to my own impulses,” she says, citing Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter as the beginning of this new direction. “It was very clear [with this film] that what Pedro and I wanted to do was to sink even further into my own impulses, to make something much closer to my own responses.

“This film is a personal business for me. I’ve had experience in being in Ingrid’s position many times – my first Martha was [longtime collaborator] Derek Jarman [who died in 1994],” she explains. “What I’ve learned has not only informed me and my attitude to my own living and dying, but to this performance. I know Pedro was aware of that and he wove it into the writing, so it was written for my wiring more closely than anything has been.”

The Room Next Door – released by Warner Bros in multiple international territories including the UK, and opening in the US via Sony Pictures Classics on December 20 – was shot almost completely in Spain, and Almodovar summoned his two leads to Madrid for three months of rehearsal. Swinton had only met Moore fleetingly before, but during that time the pair became as close as the characters they play.

“I would introduce her now as an old friend even though I’ve known her for barely a year,” says Swinton. “We made up for lost time. Pedro loves a lot of preparation and he maybe worked more with us because he was working in English.

“He loves to know that the script is right – he’s always tweaking. We rehearsed very assiduously on script; he’s very clear the way he wants things done.”

The reasons for this became clear when the film cranked up. “He gave us two takes!” exclaims Swinton. “Oh, god – madness. Most directors aren’t like that, although apparently Clint Eastwood gives you one take, if you’re lucky. I was concerned he was going too fast. But now I realise he knew exactly what he was doing, and I wonder if that pell-mell feeling didn’t give us something.”

Just as in The Eternal Daughter, where she played the main character and her ageing mother, Swinton also performs – spoiler alert – a dual role in The Room Next Door: as Martha and her estranged daughter Michelle, who enters the film after her death. Almodovar had seen Hogg’s film and, in Swinton’s words, “presented [playing both parts] to me as a fait accompli. It was a wise decision. I told him my preoccupations doing The Eternal Daughter – where does my mother end and I begin? – and that’s as valid for this film. They have to be played by the same person because that’s what it’s about.”

Double shift

Swinton has always been known as an actress who takes risks, both in terms of the characters she plays – often unlikeable, never uninteresting – and the films and directors she chooses to work with. Her other current project is The End, the scripted feature debut from documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act Of Killing).

Released in the US by Neon, it is a cautionary tale about a wealthy family living in a lavish bunker after a global meltdown for which they were partly responsible. If that doesn’t sound risky enough, it is also a musical.

The project marked Swinton’s first experience of singing on camera – something made more challenging by Oppenheimer choosing to film all the musical numbers live.

“The last time I sang was at a children’s carol service,” she says. “Learning new things is always inspiring and I loved the singing. It required such discipline because [we had] very long takes [which meant] having to do 15 different things at once and shooting a song in a take. I respect Josh’s documentaries, and I found the subject matter fascinating but the coup de grace was that it was going to be a musical – that made it irresistible.”

Swinton may be known as an arthouse muse, but her list of credits contains two surprises: superhero movies (as Gabriel in DC’s Constantine and the Ancient One in Marvel’s Doctor Strange) and the Narnia franchise.

“My experimental period,” she laughs. “I’m intrigued by the capacities of studios to make films that reach multi-millions of people. I’ve been lucky in having a ringside seat a couple of times to figure out how it works. It’s a magic trick for me. It’s not my home turf but I’m prepared to pack a bag and go on an adventure occasionally.”

As for the future, she will star next year in Oscar and Bafta winner Edward Berger’s The Ballad Of A Small Player and in early 2026 will be reteaming with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, for whom she starred in 2021’s Memoria.

“It’s a bit like being a farmer – you put things in the ground and they come up, sometimes all at once,” says Swinton. “I had a big harvest recently so current things are all quite deep in the ground.”

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