In Pedro Almodóvar's film The Room Next Door, Tilda Swinton plays a woman with late-stage cancer who wants to end her life. She asks a friend, played by Julianne Moore, to stay with her for her last month on Earth. Swinton's performance draws on her experiences supporting and bearing witness to loved ones at the end of their lives. "A life spent considering how we're going to spend our end is not wasted time," she tells Terry Gross. "We're all going that way, and the sooner we accept and embrace that, then the ice melts and we're kind of informed of a kind of living, I think, that we wouldn't otherwise be." Swinton also talks about growing up in a military family, her sense of fashion, and being a "queer fish."Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. My guest, Tilda Swinton, stars in a new, beautiful movie called The Room Next Door. She plays a war correspondent who has dodged death several times. Now she has cancer, for which she's received harsh treatments, including in clinical trials. But the cancer progresses.
She's rejecting more treatment, refusing to continue suffering, and has decided it's time to end her life. The film is about suffering and death and choice, but it's a beautiful film because of the sometimes poetic dialogue, the emotional depth.
The relationship between the two main characters and the contrast between Swinton's ghostly presence in the film and the vibrant, color-saturated world around her, including the clothes, the walls, and the furniture, and the woods. It's a form of beauty and contrast I've come to expect from the film's writer and director, Pedro Almodovar.
He's Spanish, and this is his first English-language feature film. Tilda Swinton started off in the film Avant-Garde. She made several films with the director Derek Jarman, including her first film, Caravaggio, and never expected, or maybe never even sought, commercial success. But she got it anyway.
Many filmgoers were introduced to her in the title role of the 1992 film Orlando, adapted from a 1928 Virginia Woolf novel, in which a young nobleman, a favorite of Queen Elizabeth's, inexplicably wakes up as a woman. Swinton won an Oscar for her performance in the popular 2007 legal thriller Michael Clayton.
She's been in several Wes Anderson films, the Joanna Hogg films The Souvenir and The Eternal Daughter, and the Luca Guadagnino films I Am Love, Suspiria, and A Bigger Splash, the Julio Torres film Problemista, and the Coen brothers Hail Caesar and Burn After Reading. Swinton even has a place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the Ancient One.
Her new film, The Room Next Door, is adapted from the 2020 novel What Are You Going Through? by Sigrid Nunes. Swinton's character, Martha, is planning to end her life. She doesn't want to die in her Manhattan home surrounded by things she loves. She thinks it will be easier to die in a house in the woods that has no personal connection.
So she rents a beautiful home in the woods for one month, planning on dying before the month is up. She wants solitude, but she also wants a friend to accompany her. After several friends decline, she asks an old friend who Martha had lost touch with. The friend, Ingrid, played by Julianne Moore, is a novelist who has found out Martha is sick and has been visiting her.
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