Tilda Swinton may be ready to say goodbye to acting.
The actress sat down with Elle alongside her The Room Next Door co-star Julianne Moore for the publication’s Women in Hollywood issue. During their conversation, the women addressed their goals in their careers at this point decades after they started in the 1980s, and Swinton had an interesting take.
“I’ve always intended that each film would be my final one,” she told the magazine. “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.”
Swinton has previously expressed that she never intended to have a decades-long career in acting. In a conversation with The Guardian in 2022, she revealed she only ever intended to make one film.
“I like seeing people for the first time in a film,” she told the publication at the time. “It’s one of the reasons I love documentary. I love seeing people, I’m not interested in seeing actors at all. And the best way if you’re an actor to avoid that annoyance for the audience is just to do one film; then they’ve seen you, they’ve met you, you were interesting and new and they never have to see you again.”
Pedro Almodóvar‘s The Room Next Door follows Ingrid (Moore) and Martha (Swinton), who were close friends in their youth when they worked together at the same magazine. “After years of being out of touch, they meet again in an extreme but strangely sweet situation,” the logline reads.
The Oscar-winning actresses feel like the movie is relevant today because it touches on life and death, which is a very real aspect of living.
“A friend of mine died the other day,” the Mary & George star told Elle. “She’s our age and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I said to Tilda, ‘I can’t believe this happened, we literally just made a movie about this.’ So I think the movie is urgent and interesting and human, because this is it. This is what we face, and pretending that we’re not going to die is not going to do us any good. Martha says, ‘Yes, it’s hard, but I can take it.’ It’s an important part about being a human being.”
For her part, the Marvel star noted that the project’s subject is power and being powerless in the face of mortality or aging.
“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,” Swinton said. “But being powerless in the face of mortality or aging is grace. It’s life.”
The Room Next Door is set to hit theaters Dec. 20.
