“It’s About Death with Dignity”: Tilda Swinton on The Room Next Door

Tilda Swinton has known many Marthas, the terminally ill character she plays with disarming poise and vulnerability in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door. At the height of the Aids epidemic, the actor and one-time muse of the New Queer cinema movement went to 43 funerals in a single year, a trauma that eventually pushed her to leave London for the Scottish Highlands, where she lives to this day. (Her Palm Dog-winning spaniel makes a cameo appearance on our call.)

“My first ‘Martha’ taught me that attitude of absolute gratitude, absolute liveliness in the face of dying, which seems to me to be completely appropriate, because there’s only so much interest one can have in death,” says Swinton of her connection to the feature, Almodóvar’s first in the English language. She excels in the role of Martha, a war correspondent who decides to take her own life after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis. Martha makes an unusual request of an old friend, author Ingrid (Julianne Moore), when she comes to see her in the hospital one day, proposing a shared trip to a house upstate, where she plans to go out at a moment of her choosing. When it’s done, says Martha, she’ll leave her bedroom door open – a final courtesy to her friend who, unlucky for her, also has a fear of dying.

Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through, it’s an end-of-life drama that finds the Spanish maestro in ruminative mode, despite flashes of his old wicked humour. “It’s a film in favour of euthanasia,” the 75-year-old director said simply at the premiere in Venice, where the film took home the Golden Lion award. But it’s a word Swinton prefers to steer clear of. “For me, it’s more about what I would call death with dignity,” says the actor, who considered retraining as a palliative nurse after her own parents’ death, “because this is about someone taking things into their own hands … It’s [a subject] that’s dear to my heart because it’s something I’ve had to think about a lot over the last few years.”

Martha is steely and self-possessed, a war-zone veteran whose chief objection to her illness is the loss of autonomy it entails. Still, she has deep regrets over her daughter, from whom she has become estranged, and feels that she needs Martha’s company in order to go through with her plans. The relationship between the two is at the heart of the film, each finding strength in unexpected ways through the other’s presence. “One of the things I find very beautiful in the film is the way these two women sort of transfer each other’s courage into each other,” says Swinton. “Pedro asked me who I thought [should play Martha] and Julianne’s face just swam into mind; our emails crossed and it was the same name coming back, so I was relieved he felt the same way.”

This isn’t Swinton’s first time collaborating with Almodóvar: the pair made a short film together, The Human Voice, in 2020, as a trial run for this one. It’s been a special thrill for the actor – who has spoken of Almodóvar as a “cousin” to the likes of Derek Jarman for his deeply irreverent early works – to help him realise his long-held ambition to work in the language. (Almodóvar’s English is, by his own admission, a little bit shaky.) “I like to say that Pedro writes in high heels,” says Swinton, “and from talking to some of his actors, apparently it’s the same thing in his Spanish films. The language is a little bit heightened, a little bit elevated. It’s not mumblecore by any manner or means; he’s not really interested in naturalism. It’s got this slightly fairytale quality.”

Almodóvar has never hidden his anxieties about working in English. (There’s a parallel universe somewhere out there where he accepted the offer to make Sister Act, the Whoopi Goldberg comedy, in the early 90s.) How, then, did the director find his feet on the film, given his finely tuned approach to words in general? “The amazing thing about that is he’s not really listening to the language, he’s listening to the music,” says Swinton. “That sounds like a winsome thing to say but it’s actually really practical. We rehearsed for six months and he would ask us over and over again to repeat our lines; it’s like he was trying to understand the music of the English.”

The pair first met years ago, at the kind of ritzy Hollywood party Swinton has long since fled from attending. But it was only on their second encounter when she plucked up the courage to tell him she was a fan; thinking she wasn’t his ‘type’ as an actor, she firmly expected that to be the end of it. But femininity, for Almodóvar, has always been a broad church, and Swinton makes perfect sense in his universe – remember, the actor’s breakout role came with her monumental study in tortured motherhood, We Need to Talk About Kevin. And if Martha is a complicated mother in the classic Almodóvarian mould, something about Swinton’s delivery of lines like “I was never the way a mother should be” hits differently from the star of Sally Potter’s take on Orlando, an ur-text of gender-fluidity written in the 20s.

“I’m still flummoxed by the concept of gender-fluidity,” says Swinton, “not because fluidity flummoxes me, but the idea of a lack of fluidity flummoxes me, the idea of being fixed or not feeling the licence to play with any shape, with any narrative or identity. It’s always felt to me [like] one of the most fruitful and meaningful aspects of performance, that one remains fluid. That one is, you know, a dog one minute and an old lady the next. It’s what children know, and maybe grown-up ‘proper’ actors forget when they become attached to some identity or [other]. I mean, when you look like me you have to make friends very early with the idea of looking kind of transitional – or not transitional, that’s not a word I can’t use without it being quite loaded now – but like you’re in a kind of limbo state, and I came to embrace it when I was quite young. And that, for me, means freedom.”

Throughout his career, Almodóvar has proved himself a master at smuggling in big themes through scenarios that wouldn’t feel out of place in a TV soap. The Room Next Door is a film about dying, but it’s also, for Swinton, a film about the importance of bearing witness. To that end, there’s a subplot about a mutual ex-boyfriend, professor Damian (John Turturro), who meets with Ingrid while out on a lecture tour about climate collapse. Exasperated by people’s willingness to turn a blind eye to environmental disaster, he’s become depressed and cynical about his work, a fact that Ingrid counters by telling him “there are many different ways to live inside a tragedy”. “The film is really in many senses a fairy story about these two women,” says Swinton, “but it’s also about all of us being in the room next door to each other all of the time – just as we’re in the room next door to each other now, and we are also all of us in the room next door to Gaza or Beirut, to Yemen or the United States.”

Swinton has a way of talking about art that’s infectious to be around. To be invited into her company is like being part of the world’s best reading club; she has an instinctive feeling for the poetry of her craft that makes itself known in crisp, fully-formed sentences. It’s hardly a spoiler to share that Martha doesn’t make it out of the film alive, so we’ll leave the last word to Tilda, finding the beauty in the ending Almodóvar imagines for her: “Martha goes out enmeshed in the three things I’ve always thought of as the things that will get us through, which is friendship, art and nature,” she reflects. “Those are the things that she goes out in concert with, and it’s a triumphant story, really. She gets a good death. And that’s a lot to ask for, but it’s a wonderful thing to get.“

The Room Next Door premieres at the London Film Festival on October 19 ahead of an October 25 release in the UK.