Tilda Swinton: “I’m a Freak”

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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.