Tilda Swinton - Confessions of an outsider
Hollywood may be knocking on her door, but Tilda Swinton will never fit in, she tells Gaynor Flynn
Friday, 29 August 2008
Mention her Oscar win in February and actress Tilda Swinton bursts out laughing. She still finds it "hilarious" that she walked away with one of the highly coveted statues. When you tell her she was riveting as the ambitious lawyer in Michael Clayton, she looks at you like you're soft in the head. "But these awards are for actresses, and I'm not really an actress," she says, surprised that she has to spell it out. "Because the more I know about what real actors are subjected to in terms of their position within the film-making process, I realise that I'm not one at all."
Swinton describes herself as "a film fan who got lucky". Her next film, the Coen brothers' shaggy dog thriller, Burn After Reading, opened the Venice Film Festival earlier this week. Swinton plays Katie, the supercilious wife of a mid-level intelligence analyst (played by John Malkovich) who is having an affair with George Clooney's sex-crazed federal marshal.
Swinton also has two more widely divergent films due for release in the next few months. There's the Hungarian director Bela Tarr's The Man From London and David Fight Club Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, an odd little story about a man born old (Brad Pitt), who ages backwards. Swinton plays Pitt's first love in 1930s Russia. In both films the actress is on screen for all of about five minutes. Why choose such tiny roles?
"I don't choose roles, I choose people," she says. "I've never chosen a role in my life. The idea is an anathema to me. That's why I say I'm not a proper actress, because I've heard other actors talking about how they have to fight to be part of the conversation and I've never had that experience. I choose the person and then we'll decide what we're going to do together and magically it will appear four years later."
Indeed, Swinton doesn't seem to do anything according to conventional standards. For a start there's her love life. Her boyfriend, Sandro Kopp (a New Zealand artist), is almost 20 years her junior. The father of her twins, John Byrne (a Scottish artist), is almost 20 years her senior, and the two are "great friends".
Then there's her career. Most fortysomething actresses despair over the lack of interesting roles. But Swinton, at 47, says: "I am strangely impervious to that. I think it's partly because I was never going to be bimbo material. So I just kept my head down in my twenties. I had this strange instinct that I would only begin to start my real work within my forties."
Swinton started out in the theatre but "didn't enjoy school enough to enjoy theatre," she says. Instead film's "lack of articulacy" attracted her. "I've always been a huge film geek and the second I started making films I knew," she says. But it also had a lot to do with her mentor, Derek Jarman. Swinton was 26 when she made her debut in Caravaggio. Jarman cast her because she looked like the women in the artist's work. The pair became great friends and went on to make nine films over seven years before he died of Aids-related illnesses in 1994.
That relationship has informed many extraordinarily complicated performances: the gender-shifting lead in Orlando, an androgynous, morally conflicted angel in Constantine, the White Witch of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But she's just as capable of playing flesh and blood women, like the mother who goes to extraordinary lengths to protect her son in The Deep End, or the matriarch of a dysfunctional clan in Thumbsucker.
When you meet Swinton you wonder how she does it. At 5ft 11in, with flaming red hair and skin so white it's almost translucent, she's not exactly ordinary looking, and yet she moulds those exotic features of hers into all manner of characters. Her friend, the photographer Johnnie Shand Kydd, once commented that she "can look like Dietrich one minute and Gollum the next".
"I was always a bit of an outsider," she says now, "which is probably why I was attracted to the arts in the first place. It seems to me that the job of an artist is kind of to report from outside the pale. Besides, the outside place was always where the most fun was happening." She laughs.
What's changed recently is that Swinton's edgy allure is suddenly in demand on the inside. But, as if to prove just how un-Hollywood she is, after Michael Clayton Swinton was offered lucrative lead roles. What did she do? She went off and made a little experimental documentary about Jarman with visual artist Isaac Julien. "How much money do we need?" she asks, rolling her eyes. "Luckily I'm pretty lightweight in terms of overheads. I don't have a major heroin addiction to support or any airplanes to fuel... People get so caught up in thinking that they need their lives or career to go a certain way. I don't get it." The only thing Swinton "needs" (besides her family) is her work and she's about to ramp it up. "In the last few years I've had small children [Xavier and Honor] and I've been loath to be away from them much," she says. "But that's going to change now that they're 10. I'm just on the verge of starting my life's work. Well, not necessarily with Benjamin Button, but there's a whole series of other films. Just wait and see," she says with glee.
'Burn After Reading', 'The Man from London' and 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' open later in the year
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