Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton to Star in New Pedro Almodóvar Film The Room Next Door: ‘What a Dream’
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Pedro Almodóvar‘s newest film is packing some major star power.
Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton will appear alongside one another for the first time in Almodóvar’s upcoming feature film The Room Next Door, read a post on Instagram that was re-shared by the Spanish filmmaker’s production company, El Deseo.
Along with confirming the movie’s title and actresses’ involvement, the post said that they will be “placed under the command of the director from La Mancha in a drama between mother and daughter that will be filmed in the spring in New York and Madrid.”
The caption added that The Room Next Door will be Almodóvar’s “first film shot in English.”
Sharing a photo of the trio to her own Instagram grid, Moore, 63, wrote, “What a dream to be with these 2 – I feel so lucky! Starting work on #TheRoomNextDoor with the maestro #pedroalmodóvar and the magnificent #tildaswinton @eldeseo_.”
The Room Next Door will be Almodóvar’s newest project after last year’s short film Strange Way of Life and 2021’s feature film Parallel Mothers, which earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Penélope Cruz.
Almodóvar, 74, also wrote both films. Back when Parallel Mothers closed out the 59th New York Film Festival in October 2021, Cruz, 49, told PEOPLE that the director is “like family to me.”
The filmmaker and Cruz have worked together on seven films together: Live Flesh (1997), All About My Mother (1999), Volver (2006), Broken Embraces (2009), I’m So Excited! (2013), Pain and Glory (2019) and Parallel Mothers (2021).
“We’re really close. We understand each other. We can read each other’s minds. We can never lie to each other. We don’t even try. So, all of that — it just helps and makes it easy to work with each other,” she said of her fellow Spaniard.
“However, on set we make sure to give each other space, so that we maintain respect for one another,” Cruz added at the time. “It’s a good balance we have. It’s been like 30 years since I met him, and 25 years working together, and I hope many more. He’s really special.”
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Strange Way of Life follows two men (played by Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal) who reunite after more than two decades, amid a volatile Western backdrop. The short film premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival last May.
Speaking with IndieWire in June 2022, Almodóvar described the story as “intimate” but hesitated to draw too big a parallel between Strange Way of Life and 2005’s Brokeback Mountain.
“The relation between these two guys is animalistic,” he told the outlet. “It was a physical relationship. The punch of the movie comes when they have to separate, and Heath Ledger discovers that he can’t think about leaving. That’s a strong discovery.”
“But until that moment, it is animalistic, and for me it was impossible to have that in the movie because it was a Hollywood movie,” Almodóvar added. “You could not have these two guys f—ing all the time.”
