Tilda Swinton Talks ‘The Room Next Door,’ ‘Bizarre’ Oscars Experience

Tilda Swinton, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is a performer — she disavows the label “actress” — unlike any other.

Swinton has been described by The Guardian as “one of the most gifted and fearless actors of her generation”; by The New Yorker as “the avant-garde’s Garbo, a manifestation of ideas in the flesh”; by Roger Ebert as “a fearless actress who takes big risks in her films”; by the Sydney Morning Herald as someone who “plays more wildly adventurous characters than just about anyone in the movies”; and by the New York Times as “not only a uniquely exciting performer, but also one of the great living theorists of performance,” who delivers “daring, shape-shifting acting.”

The winner of an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award and a European Film Award, she is also a recipient of the Berlin Film Festival’s best actress prize, the British Independent Film Awards’ Richard Harris Award for Outstanding Contribution by an Actor, BAFTA LA’s Britannia Award for British Artist of the Year, the Telluride Film Festival’s Silver Medallion, a Museum of Modern Art Film Benefit special tribute, a British Film Institute Fellowship and the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement. And she was chosen in 2020, by the film critics of the New York Times, as one of the 25 greatest actors of the 21st century.

Over the course of a conversation at the L.A. offices of The Hollywood Reporter, the 64-year-old reflected on the early years of her career, which she spent in collaboration with the experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman, and how their way of working together has shaped her approach to filmmaking since he died; how choosing people rather than projects has led to her unusually eclectic filmography, which ranges from the most arty of art house films to the biggest of blockbusters; why she was particularly drawn to her most recent project, The Room Next Door — Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature — in which she plays a terminally-ill woman who enlists an old friend, played by Julianne Moore, to help her die on her own terms; plus much more.