Tilda Swinton Always a master of disguise. Lately, he has been busy Playing a double role in the likes of Sighs And Eternal daughterand experimenting with everything from extreme aging makeup Grand Budapest Hotel In extremely false teeth Bong Joon-hoof ok And Snowpier. Even the role for which she won her Oscar, that of a depressed corporate attorney Michael ClaytonIt was all about keeping secrets and unraveling their ugliness. So when Swinton tells me, in her new film Room next door“I look like me,” too she seems surprised. It’s not something she’s used to. Neither are we: Fans have come to expect outrageous, winking, transformative work from Swinton, and over her decades on screen, she’s delivered.
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Maybe that’s what makes her so vulnerable The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodovars first English language featureSo especially heartbreaking. Swinton plays Martha, a former war correspondent living with stage-three cervical cancer, who finds her longtime friend, Ingrid (Julian Moore), to help her die on her own terms. The intimate drama won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, set the stage for a promising awards campaign, and showcased Swinton at her rawest and most affecting.
room It’s the second Swinton film to hit screens in the past week. In Telluride, I saw her do something I’d never seen before: a musical. Joshua Oppenheimerof The end Brings to life a dark family story at the end of the world with original, golden age soundstage numbers. Swinton’s deeply repressed matriarch defies reality at every turn, whether through song or silence. Again, it is extraordinary, and again, it is revealing something new.
Sitting with the London native in a stuffy conference room in Toronto, where both of his films are screening this week, it’s clear the decorated actor is working deep inside — reinventing himself as an actor along the way.
Vanity Fair: I have had a great 48 hours with your work. i saw The end in Telluride, before catching up The Room Next Door Back home in LA.
Tilda Swinton: That’s probably the right way, I’d say. They are both about endings, but [Room Next Door] Maybe more powerful. One is about self-determination and the ability to really take things into one’s own hands. And the second is: basically, there is nothing to do. [Laughs]
In Telluride, Joshua Oppenheimer mentions in his introduction The End That you couldn’t be there because another film of yours premiered in Venice at the same time. It’s an interesting problem.
Yes, a very strange embarrassment of riches. I don’t know if it’s an American saying, but it’s definitely a saying I was raised with: It never rains, but it pours. You have been waiting for a long time and then two roles come up at the same time. They have this link in their minds, so it seems only fitting that they should both start raining at the same moment.
in Room next doorYou develop this incredibly intimate relationship with Julianne Moore onscreen. How did you find that depth together?
For me, that’s a really concerning departure. It has been a long time since I have worked in such collusion with another artist. The endWhich was the last piece of work I had made before, it was an ensemble, and we worked together in a group. But there is something about this twosome The Room Next DoorWhich was such a delicious proposition especially for me. It was her, and he was Pedro. The thing about the film is that in my mind it is a fairy tale. It’s not natural – Pedro doesn’t even work with reality. He is working with a kind of elevated tone. Knowing you’re always in high heels, finding grounding, and a partner you feel so connected to—makes it all right.
Does this kind of work take you to a different place as an actor?
This is one of the things I’m particularly enjoying with both films: I’m a very slow burn when it comes to even thinking about performance. I’m not really aware of the performance, and I certainly can’t speak to it. Works in improvisation together Joanna [Hogg] on souvenir [films] And Eternal daughter Definitely made me curious about finding a new way to perform with text. The end And The Room Next Door It gave me a chance to see what I could do to work with certain types of operations, but with text. In improvisation, you literally write as you speak, which is what I love to do. But when you’re working with a script, that’s an extra hurdle because the question is: How do you make this sound like you’re literally coming up with it? As someone not at all versed in thinking about acting, it’s a bit of an experiment.
Are you enjoying thinking more about acting now?
Yes, I am. Room next door is especially vague. This is a very personal film for me. I look like myself. I can’t think of anything Martha says that I can’t say myself, or wouldn’t say to myself. I’ve made a game out of dressing up and playing around for so many years that it’s like an adventure. I really enjoyed making the film for this reason, just to feel like I was sinking into something rather than reaching up.
Is it scary?
It is the opposite. No, it’s a big relief.
So why are you focusing more on this game instead of doing this kind of work?
I don’t know. Not that I’m actively choosing to not To do this. It’s that I’m actively choosing to do something else – with my peers, together Bong Joon-howith Jim Jarmusch, with Wes Anderson. It’s just been what I’ve been doing.
Without spoiling anything, this is also a year where you have a film in which you play two characters. thinking Sighs Or Eternal daughterYou’ve been doing that a lot lately.
To be honest with you, I always did. i mean, All Way back. I mean, too Lynn Hershman Leesonof Technology from [2002]. I have always loved playing with the idea of creating one portrait out of many identities. I will say it though [in this year’s case]That was not my suggestion. I was worried about him. I was more concerned about it here than others. But in this, I see now, I believe it was the right decision.
You mentioned Room next door Being personal to you, that reminds me of a few years ago, when you said The Guardian You were considering a career shift In palliative care. Am I right about that?
We were talking about Covid, and I was saying that during Covid, I would consider – if we’re not making a movie now – training and working in palliative care. It’s something that’s always in my pocket, that possibility, yes.
I know you’ve talked a lot about caring in general, so did this part of the film feel so personal?
It is, absolutely. I have had the privilege of being in Ingrid’s position for quite some time now. It’s been a blessing in my life, so making a film about the ability to witness someone in that kind of predicament is really a particularly personal event for me.
Can you talk a little more about working with Julian in that regard?
We both feel really lucky because the truth is we haven’t known each other for 30 years. We’re the same age, and we ran into each other a couple of times in passing, maybe in the corridor here and said, “I’d love to hang out, let’s work together someday.” And I thought, “Well, when is that likely to happen?” When we came to make the film, which is a film about two women who have known each other for 30, 40 years, it was actually a fake thing. But it was too easy to fake because it might as well be true. We fell into a very easy rhythm, and we could immediately imagine that we had known each other for 40 years.
Going back to what you were saying about Pedro not working in naturalism, you also have to develop that dynamic with the dialogue which, of course, is not realistic.
All right, all right. PEDRO I don’t mind telling you this, his listening isn’t the best—but he’s listening to music. He doesn’t even necessarily hear what words we are saying. I would suggest that this music isn’t even Spanish, though – it’s Pedro’s language, in vibrations…. I think it would be a mistake to expect a kind of natural English for an Anglophone audience. This is Pedro as Spanish-speaking audiences will recognize that they don’t even get a kind of natural vernacular Spanish from him. In this film, you sit down, you haven’t seen anyone in 40 years, and you basically tell the story of your life. It often doesn’t happen that way. [Laughs] But he does in Pedro’s films.
The End It is also not particularly concerned with naturalness. You’ve rehearsed for weeks, but do you feel comfortable getting into the music?
It was really delightful. I mean, I’ve never sung outside of a children’s carol concert or university choir before. And taking lessons and rehearsing singing and singing in unison with my peers was exciting. It was really, really a thrill. I liked it. We all discovered our different ways of singing, because we all sang differently from each other for different reasons—we all brought different instruments and our voices had to have different characters.
For an actor with a career as long and varied as yours, it’s interesting to hear you talk about entering uncharted territory.
There is no point if it doesn’t. I’m talking from a selfish point of view, but it’s very self-serving—or rather, I should say, it’s a nice thing to be curious, and it’s nice to go down a new lane and into fresh snow. Because of this both of them were really very satisfied. They were both real departures. They should be a double bill.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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