Tilda Swinton: “I’m a Freak”

Tilda Swinton likes to shatter tidy identities. She is often described as androgynous, but even that term diminishes her complex self-presentation. She currently appears in both Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control and Erick Zonca’s Julia. Both films reflect her adventurous approach to roles and her unwillingness to be typecast. While Swinton cut her teeth in art-house cinema, working with Derek Jarman, the experimental gay British filmmaker, she has gone on to become a Hollywood presence, if not a fixture. She appeared with George Clooney in Michael Clayton and Burn After Reading, and won an Oscar for best supporting actress in 2008 for her role in the former. In Julia Swinton plays an aging alcoholic who has seen better days. Desperate for money, she kidnaps the child of a fellow alcoholic, and the plot escalates from there. The film is at once difficult to watch and strangely rewarding, in no small part because of the fine-bore touches of Swinton’s performance—waking up after a bender, for example, she does something extraordinary with her dry pink tongue licking her lips. Swinton spoke to us by phone shortly before Julia was released about identity, femininity, the Oscars, the future for women in film, and more. ­

MEGHAN O’ROURKE: You’ve taken a lot of parts that seem to challenge fixed notions about gender identity. I’m thinking of Orlando or the archangel Gabriel in Constantine. Do you consciously seek out those roles?

TILDA SWINTON: Well, I don’t consciously seek out any roles. I consciously seek out conversations with filmmakers. I consciously seek out material, and very often that material will be about identity. Not gender identity, but I do realize, as time rolls on and I try to find the lowest common denominator of all my work, that I’m constantly thinking about transformation. I’m intrigued by the idea of pressures that people put themselves under (and are put under by society) to fix themselves in a single identity and not transform. I’m interested to take that position and place it within a story where that identity is challenged—where a precipice, if you like, is presented to that person. You transform, or you fail or you fall. You either change or you know you will perish, as it were. Maybe because I am a performer; maybe because I am an artist; maybe because I’m a freak, I don’t know. But it’s always occurred to me that transformation is inevitable and constantly available. And it’s never occurred to me to hang on to any identity for dear life and fight off anything else.

MO'R: In the past you’ve often talked about the difference between performing and acting. What is the difference in your mind between the two?

TILDA SWINTON: Maybe in Julia [2] for the first time I am not only approaching being an actress but am actually playing an actress. There was really nothing in the wiring of Julia that felt familiar to me. Personally. There’s nothing I can pull from within my own sensibility. But I feel like I know her very, very well; I’ve known so many people whom she reminds me of. And so, in a way, my task was to impersonate her to make something quite exterior but to fill it out by placing something over the top of me, rather than pulling something from within me. It’s like a disguise that one puts on from within—from outside rather than from growing something from seed from inside.

MO'R: One of the things that’s remarkable about your performance in Julia was the intense expressive physicality of the role. Julia, your character, is an aging alcoholic. How do you locate the physicality of the role? I mean, was that something you thought about?

TILDA SWINTON: Yes. In many ways, it’s sort of all the work I feel I ever do. Particularly since I haven’t always worked within this kind of naturalistic territory. I’ve worked many times in a much more cerebral, expressive way.

MO'R: You mean in the beginning of your career, with Derek Jarman?

TILDA SWINTON: Yes. Recently, working with Erick Zonca [3] [the director of Julia], it’s been in a much more naturalistic, more realistic landscape. It’s been important to locate the energy in a more minute caliber. I knew that Erick was interested in working with a kind of documentary grain—that, for example, my body had to feel like the body of a woman who had lived that life. So when one’s going to say to the audience, about Julia, This is somebody who has abused her body with alcohol over 25 years, who has chain smoked, and is in denial about her age, living life large as if she was still a 21-year-old babe, it’s important that I look as much as possible like that person. Because otherwise it’ll be fake. It’ll be theatrical at some level. That sense of waste, that sense of ruin, had to be absolutely present and absolutely revealed rather than pretended or affected. Which meant that I had to eat a lot of pasta and do a lot of chain smoking and wreck myself as much as possible. Of course it is pretend, but it was a realistic, long 12 months. Put that together with the fact that she’s carrying too much flesh, that her clothes are too tight, and it all goes together to connect as a shorthand for the story. You don’t need to ask her what she’s been doing the last 25 years. It’s obvious.

MO'R: There was a striking visual moment early on when she’s waking up in the car with a married man; her clothes are falling off and too tight, and you do something sort of extraordinary with your tongue.

TILDA SWINTON: You know the difference between what she thought she looked like at midnight, smashed out of her skull, when she went in the ladies room and looked in the mirror and thought she looked fantastic, and then the next morning, when the hair clip has been lost and you can see her roots and her bra strap peeking out. You just see that the facade has slipped. You see the ruin of what she thought she was.

MO'R: One thing I was thinking about when I was reflecting on your roles is that you seem to have an attraction to multiplicity.

TILDA SWINTON: Yeah, a kind of openness. For example, The Deep End is about a woman, Margaret Hall, who for 19 years has hung on to this notion of herself as a mother—being completely selfless, being incredibly all-embracingly nurturing of her children, without any sense of self beyond that. And she’s suppressed this other sense of herself that comes up when she has this attraction to this blackmailer. She starts to act alone, at the precipice. And at the same time you have Julia who has this identity of herself as the party girl endlessly attractive to men, a siren, and this point comes when she feels her life slipping away from her, and she must do something to change it, and she goes on this extraordinary adventure. It’s the same thing and all dealing to a certain extent with artifice and with the playing of a role. Margaret Hall in The Deep End is playing the role of a mother just as much as Julia is playing the role of a fabulous party girl. There are other truths. I mean, there’s a truth that Margaret Hall has all sorts of secret longings—I don’t know, being a teenager on the back of somebody’s bike. And Julia has, you know, the longing to cry on someone’s shoulder about the fact that she might be growing old. But they are artificially suppressing these other selves. They have decided that they are not more than one thing. And I find that decision to be only one thing very moving. I think it’s unnecessary, and I think it causes people sooo much trouble. It’s true of men and women, but I’m particularly interested obviously in looking at the ways in which women are so—they circumscribe themselves. Staying open and fluid and transformative somehow feels transgressive a lot of the time.

MO'R: It does. You think about the endless emphasis on having to get the work-life balance right, as though there are two compartments in life that you’re supposed to perfect.

TILDA SWINTON: That makes me laugh. I don’t know if you saw Michael Clayton; but I love the moment in Michael Clayton when the Karen Crowder character is rehearsing her questions to the interviewer. She rehearses her answer to that question. That question is so terrifying for her.

MO'R: You’ve talked about being shy and quiet as a child. Now, to the outside observer, at least, you would seem comfortable in your skin as a performer—and you have a distinct sense of personal style. I wonder if, in your mind, that is a transformation that occurred akin to the kinds of transformations you describe your characters experiencing.

TILDA SWINTON: Interesting. It’s never occurred to me to think that a transformation has occurred. I just imagine that it’s still around the corner ahead of me. I don’t feel any less shy, to be honest with you. I don’t feel any less solitary. I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like a completed work. But I feel that I’m beginning to get the hang of working with it all and, you know, just trying to figure it out. I think ducking and diving is possibly the best the best way to describe my attitude to that. I’m just trying to keep moving. What do they say about sharks?

MO'R: That they have to swim to stay alive.

TILDA SWINTON: Yeah, a little bit that. I’m not so much staying still but keeping looking, keeping moving. It’s serving me, I think.

MO'R: One thing that often comes up in pieces about you is what people term your "unconventional" personal life: Writers often focus on the fact that you have children with one man, with whom you are still friends, but also have another lover. It reminds me of reading about Vanessa Bell or Virginia Woolf in Bloomsbury; I’m always struck that we still seem to find this surprising. Can you comment?

TILDA SWINTON: I’ve been asked about this a couple of times today; I’d be intrigued to find out what the stories are. And of course there’s hilarious information out there that I wouldn’t even dream of messing with because it’s just too funny.

MO'R: Well, it’s probably good for your reputation

TILDA SWINTON: But I find it really interesting and slightly sad that it would be considered exotic to have children with one person, and remain very close friends with them, and to have a relationship with someone else. It has somehow morphed into some sort of polyamorous orgiastic experience. I mean, it’s sad if it’s exotic to be friends with someone one is so, so closely tied to and that he would be friends with, you know, my sweetheart. I mean, that seems to me really sad that people find it exotic. I think people are really into marriages these days.

MO'R: They really are.

TILDA SWINTON: Much more here than in Europe, the idea that you can have children and not be married seems to surprise people. If you’re not married, you morph from being a couple but you remain a family; and then if one starts a new relationship or something else there’s no divorce and there’s no acrimony and there’s no division of the spoils. Maybe that’s the thing that’s shocking to people—that there’s no acrimony.

MO'R: You have such a distinctive sense of style. Do you have a philosophy of fashion, to put it grandly?

TILDA SWINTON: I’m in the extraordinary position of never going shopping. Almost never going shopping for anything except food and children’s socks. The shopping for clothes that I do is exclusively limited to a charity shop in the village where I live. I am in the position of being sent clothes by friends for when I have to go out in a golden coach and pretend not to be a pumpkin. So I don’t really shop. I choose from the clothes sent to me by my friends, and I’ve developed clothes with friends of mine. What I’m looking for always is to feel comfortable and to feel like myself. I can’t really imagine that one would want to do more than that.

MO'R: Another kind of continuity in your work: You often play people who are undergoing some huge amount of stress. Think of the characters in both Michael Clayton and The Deep End. They seem to have an almost inordinate amount of emotional restraint, but then they have these breakdowns, and often become extremely angry. In Julia, there’s an extraordinary moment of anger. Is this something you are drawn to in a script or does it emerge in the performance as you play the character?

TILDA SWINTON: Yes, I think it’s something I’m drawn to—it’s possibly something I’m comfortable with. I know about the inevitability of suppressed emotion coming up and biting one on the ass. So I’m really interested in that mechanism. It’s like I was saying: I’m kind of intrigued and to a certain extent touched by the attempt of people to get away with it. And I have a sort of glee—and it sounds sadistic, a sadistic glee at watching them from the start when they think they’ve got it all sewn up. That kind of suppression just doesn’t work. It really doesn’t.

MO'R: In your films, certainly, the viewer finds that there are these containers people try to put experiences into, and they never serve to contain.

TILDA SWINTON: It’s also personal. When people ask me about my first sense of myself as a performer, I always remember one particular moment. When I was very young, I was on a train going back to my school. I was extremely unhappy. And it suddenly occurred to me that none of the people in the carriage would be able to tell how desperate I felt. And it was like an epiphany to realize that I had no idea what was going on behind the faces of the people in the carriage with me. I began to fantasize about what was going on for them. You can never, ever know what’s going on for somebody else. However explicit they may think they’re being, they’re still choosing what to say to you. There’s stuff they’re not able to say to you. There’s stuff they’re not able to show you. There’s stuff that even if they’d like to show you there’s no way you can ever see or know about them. And I find that fascinating. This is something I love about screen performance. I find in the cinema particularly a depth, because of the scrutiny that it can afford you. It can go so close, molecularly close, right up to an unwatched face, someone who you know is not aware that they’re being scrutinized. And it can give you access to that wonder about what’s going on inside their minds.

MO'R: And a filmmaker is working with people, other people, so there’s something in that collaboration that would seem to allow for slippage.

TILDA SWINTON: You can see the dissonance. You can see that articulacy is not is not ever truly possible.

MO'R: You’ve had an interesting career, in terms of being able to do art house films, beginning by working with Derek Jarman, and now doing some Hollywood films, and working with stars like George Clooney. How do you select a project? What are the criteria for you?

TILDA SWINTON: I’m generally working in collaboration with filmmakers I know developing projects. And then recently I have been invited, as I say, to go to other people’s parties. It’s rarer and more recent that I have been involved in studio projects I haven’t been involved in developing; I’ve been going in on a surgical strike in somebody else’s film. I’ve found that really interesting, because I never looked for that opportunity. It was, as you like, the mountain coming to Mohamed rather than the other way around.

MO'R: It was a real pleasure to see you play a more comedic character in Burn After Reading. In so many of your performances, there’s a lot of dry wit. Is that something you enjoy?

TILDA SWINTON: I’ve always found it rather intriguing when people have said to me, You know, have you ever thought of doing funny? I’ve always thought everything I do is funny. I mean, I think Orlando’s hilarious but nobody else seems to. That’s just because I have a sick sense of humor.

MO'R: We asked our readers to submit questions for you. One of our readers wanted to know: What was the most challenging or difficult thing you’ve ever had to do in any of your roles?

TILDA SWINTON: I once had a very frightening diving accident when I was a child. Years later I made a film with Susan Streitfeld called Female Perversion—and this won’t mean anything to anybody because I think the scene was cut out of the film eventually, but there was a fantasy scene where I had to throw myself off a diving board into a swimming pool. I couldn’t wear contacts and basically I was blind, I couldn’t really see. And I had to do this. Absolutely terrifying. Another thing that was pretty tricky: In Julia, driving a car with very dicey brakes extremely far across the desert straight at a little boy lying in the middle of my sight. That was pretty horrendous, and whenever I see that scene I go completely dry-mouthed. Standing up in front of 3 million people to accept an Oscar was not my favorite moment in my entire life.

MO'R: That’s interesting because it almost seems like in some of your roles you have to do things that seem extremely difficult to me from the outside, but I guess there’s—that idea of performing maybe makes it easier.

TILDA SWINTON: Like what, for example? I’m curious. I mean, I suppose one man’s risk is another man’s comfort zone.

MO'R: I think that some of the moments of anger—that would feel very exposing to me. Actually, the dancing scene in the bar at the beginning of Julia. I was thinking, Wow, that would be hard for me to do.

TILDA SWINTON: (laughs) I thought that playing drunk was going to be really hard. Until I realized it came naturally. Because, not being a drinker myself, I realized that I have actually been pretending to be drunk for years. Among friends, just getting high on their drunkenness, just throwing myself around in a sort of fake way.

MO'R: There’s a wonderful sense of that larger-than-life quality to Julia.

TILDA SWINTON: I think one of the things that really moved me about Julia is how lonely she it. She’s so unmet. Nobody is up-to-speed for her. Nobody. And she’s so ripe for it, so up for it, and none of them...Maybe the only person in the film who really reads her properly is the boy. He’s such a contravention to her endless blabber mouth. And, again, he’s a freak. He’s unsocialized in the way that she is.

MO'R: That aspect of the film reminded me of Gloria, the John Cassavetes film. That sense of being lonely in the world, this lonely woman who is kind of a little past her prime and a little blowzy and has this relationship with a child that somehow exposes—like there’s a need that starts to be met in that very unexpected relationship.

TILDA SWINTON: One always thinks about Cassavetes, always. And with Julia I thought of Gena Rowlands, funnily enough less Gloria than Opening Night. But yes, of course there are all sorts of quite similar tropes that are shared. There’s just the whole visual spectacle of woman and gun and boy with curly hair from Mexico. It’s all pretty similar territory. But I don’t believe that Cassavetes’ project is really that similar to Zonca’s. Mainly the similarity is in the camera work and the aesthetic rather than the actual material. I think Zonca is much more interested in isolation, a kind of inner world, and Cassavetes is much more interested in language. He’s much—his project is much more theatrical.

MO'R: I noticed in a recent interview you talked about your love of poetry, and even about wanting to be a poet. Do you have a favorite poet?

TILDA SWINTON: Well, I have this sort of awful guilty secret, which is, Meghan—which is that I was a poet, and I actually went to university as a poet. I originally studied social and political science. I got in—my entrance was quite unorthodox. I was given, granted an entry as a poet. But I stopped writing pretty much the second I arrived to Cambridge, and I’ve always felt very ashamed of it. I’ve started writing again since, but I’ve not written poetry. I’ve yet to creep back up onto poetry. My favorite poets. Oh, Lord. At the moment I would say Sorley MacClean, Matthew Smith, John Donne, William Carlos Williams. I’m rubbing my head as I’m speaking because I’m ashamed.

MO'R: No, no, no. You needn’t be full of shame. It’s not as if you’ve been doing nothing in the intervening years.

TILDA SWINTON: This is one of the reasons I find it uncomfortable to call myself an actor, because it feels like a distraction from what I really feel I should be doing. I feel that I have failed my original identity, which is to be a writer. And I’ve been hugely distracted by performing. But I’m trying not to. I’m trying to write and trying to get off the drug and go back to getting a real job as a poet.

MO'R: Oh, yes, those real jobs as poets. There are so many of them.

TILDA SWINTON: I do think it’s interesting that I became able to perform at the point at which I stopped writing. You know, particularly writing poetry. I mean, I think that the experience I had when I was 10 and I was sitting on the train—that was a screen performance realization, that realization that one can never know beyond someone’s face what he or she’s really experiencing. But I think it’s also a poet’s realization. And maybe I need to stop being a screen performer to write poetry again.

MO'R: Or maybe, as you’ve been saying about your own characters, you could have a multiplicity of identities.

TILDA SWINTON: Yes, Doctor, maybe I could. (Laughter)

Photograph of Tilda Swinton by Getty Images