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 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.