Tim Roth sits back, almost serene, in a quiet corner of Galway during a local film festival. The weather is damp, but his energy is surprisingly light. There’s an openness in his demeanor, a brightness that contrasts sharply with the subject we’re here to discuss: grief.

Roth is in town to promote Poison, a haunting new film about parents shattered by the death of a child. But the timing is agonizingly personal. Just months after completing filming, Roth’s own son, Cormac, passed away from cancer at the age of 25. It was a brutal twist of life imitating art.

“There is no one way of grieving,” Roth says, quietly, his London accent intact despite decades in Hollywood. “Everyone does it differently. Otherwise, there would be a cure for it—and there isn’t.”

Poison, directed by Désirée Nosbusch, is a stark, emotionally raw film. Roth stars alongside Danish actress Trine Dyrholm as a couple reuniting years after the death of their child, whose body must be exhumed due to toxic leaks at the cemetery. Filmed almost entirely in a real cemetery in Luxembourg, the story delves deep into the disconnection and unresolved sorrow that often follows unimaginable loss.

The resonance for Roth is painfully real. Cormac, a gifted guitarist and composer, had been diagnosed with stage 3 germ cell cancer in 2021. Roth considered skipping the shoot to stay by his son’s side in Los Angeles. But it was Cormac who encouraged him to go.

“He thought it was a good thing,” Roth says with a bittersweet smile. “Maybe he just wanted to get me out of the house. But it had his seal of approval. If he needed me, I would have stayed.”

While Roth was filming scenes of sorrow and detachment in a graveyard, he remained hopeful back home. “We were still trying to be positive,” he says. “He was still with us.”

Nosbusch knew about Roth’s personal struggle. Having experienced a health scare with her own son years earlier, she understood the delicate space Roth occupied. “I didn’t check in constantly. Sometimes, all it took was a look. When he needed a break, I gave it to him,” she says.

When she learned Cormac had passed, she was devastated. “For a moment I feared—did my film somehow bring this on?” Roth quickly reassured her. He had no regrets. In fact, the film, he said, helped prepare him for what lay ahead.

After Cormac’s death, Roth and his family released a statement describing their grief as coming “in waves.” They remembered Cormac as a “wild and electric ball of energy” and quoted one of his mantras: “Make sure you do the things you love.”

It’s a philosophy Roth seems to have embraced from early on. His passion for acting began as a teenager, during a school production of Dracula. “It was a terrible Rocky Horror knockoff,” he laughs. “But I was hooked.” Before finding success, Roth worked odd jobs—stacking shelves, sorting mail, cold-calling for ad sales. “I was awful at it,” he admits.

His breakout came in 1982 with Made in Britain, portraying a violent skinhead. From there, he starred in everything from Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs to Altman’s Vincent & Theo and even took on villainous roles like Abomination in The Incredible Hulk and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. While some projects were, in his words, “money jobs,” others were deeply personal—like The War Zone, his own directorial debut confronting childhood abuse.

Roth doesn’t dwell on reviews or even watch his own films. “I keep them in my head,” he says. “What happens to them later is something else.”

He appreciates the uphill battle Nosbusch faced to get Poison made. “It’s just two people talking in a cemetery,” he says. “Not an easy pitch.” Yet the emotional depth of the film mirrors his own experience. “Grief is like a fingerprint—completely unique,” Roth says. “Now I see my family and friends grieving in their own way, and I’ve learned to respect that.”

Politics, too, weighs on his mind. From his home in Pasadena, which narrowly escaped the California wildfires, Roth keeps a wary eye on rising populism in the U.S. and the U.K. “Trump feels like the guy who opens the door for the real dangers,” he says. In Britain, he’s relieved the Tories are out but worries about figures like Nigel Farage: “I don’t even like saying his name.”

Yet amid the chaos of life—personal, political, environmental—Roth finds grounding in the legacy of his son and the honesty of storytelling. “There is no cure for grief,” he repeats. But perhaps, through art, there can be understanding.