Tilda Swinton has arrived at ELLE’s Women in Hollywood event in Los Angeles, held in partnership with Ralph Lauren, Harry Winston, and TikTok. The Room Next Door star posed on the carpet solo, wearing a purple tweed look by Chanel accented with a brooch.
Swinton spoke in ELLE’s Women in Hollywood issue about how she and co-star Julianne Moore connected on a deep level making the project. While their paths in Hollywood had run parallel, they never got the chance to build a true friendship until they worked alongside each other in the Spanish drama.
“The story of this film is these old, old friends,” Swinton told ELLE. She plays a war correspondent with stage 3 cancer while Moore plays her friend who confronts her own fear of death to help her.
Offscreen though, “we could have been old friends, all these years,” Swinton continued. “We’ve just made up for lost time. Now we’re old friends, even though we’ve only been together for a year.”
She also spoke about the themes of The Room Next Door, which center on mortality. “The subject really is power,” she explained. “The feeling of powerlessness that we have to engage with around mortality, or, by the way, around aging. We have to get with the program: We are powerless. And that in and of itself is a sort of taboo. It’s a particular taboo for men, because of so many toxic ways in which they are consistently brought up to believe that they have to be all powerful all the time. And if they’re not, then something has to be changed, usually by violence. But it’s also a real issue for women, because there’s this sort of strange blackmail around if you don’t feel powerful, you’re kind of letting the side down. But being powerless in the face of mortality or aging is grace. It’s life.”
In her own life, Swinton isn’t sure what’s next for her career, if anything. “I’ve always intended that each film would be my final one,” she said. “It was not wanting to jinx anything because I have had such fun from start to finish. I always thought, “Well, that’s a good one to go out on. Let’s just quit while we’re ahead.’ And I feel it today. I feel The Room Next Door is the last film I make. Let’s see if anything else happens.”
Read Swinton’s full interview here.