Swinton, Tilda

The Singular Impermanences of Tilda Swinton

“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space” 

– Hamlet, Shakespeare

Tilda Swinton is forever changing before our eyes. While writing this article, I became aware of two new productions she starred in that haven’t been released yet. In one, she plays an egocentric New York artist with curly red hair, a favourite green suit, and a superiority complex. In the other, she embodies the paranoiac mother of a wealthy family, singing heartily to protect her family in a bunker as the world ends. And this is after she said that the film she made before both of these, The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar, 2024), may be “the last film I make.” It could be that she’s goading me: “Just try to keep up!” 

The Room Next Door is only director Pedro Almodóvar’s second English language-film after the medium-length The Human Voice (2020), which also stars Tilda Swinton. In both, her acting is subtly powerful, suggesting a molten-hot core under cool metal. What struck me in the former is the extent of her artistic generosity: she acts with a steady determination to give her all and then some, unflinchingly depicting her own death as one who is not afraid to look away. This generosity reminds me of that of another great androgynous icon, with whom Swinton shared a deep friendship: David Bowie. In the video clip for Lazarus, which was released a mere three days before he died, Bowie sings with his eyes bandaged, from a white hospital bed. He does what few great artists have dared to do, returning to us as a ghost who has no illusions about his own passing. The bravery to face up to death makes great art; art which coaxes our fears out into the light so they can see the beauty in every living thing. 

Swinton isn’t dying any more than the rest of us, but like Bowie, she isn’t afraid to look away. The film portrays Ingrid (Julianne Moore), an author who hears that her old friend Martha (Tilda Swinton), a war correspondent, is dying of cervical cancer alone in a hospital. She goes to visit her, and soon Martha asks her to stay in the eponymous “Room Next Door” while she dies, with the help of an illegal pill found on the black market. As Martha, Swinton blazes with contained intensity: anger, love, longing and determination dissolve together to crystallise in her decision to die with dignity on her own terms. When the character’s pain from the cancer interrupts her conversations, her face betrays a sudden wretchedness that is almost shocking to the viewer. The lines that appear almost like scars across her face show us the real, thinning skin of a human being who is getting older, the kind Hollywood has long tried to banish just in case the happy viewer becomes aware of this very fact: we are all going to die. Her instant change from poised to devastated foreshadows her upcoming request to her friend – to help her end her life without prolonging the suffering. Who would have it any other way if they could? 

The actress playing Martha seems to sincerely understand this, and her precise acting evinces an homage to those whom she has loved and lost, and thus, by extension, to those we have all lost. Because to watch a great film is to search for feelings of our own. Since the film’s release, Swinton has been explicit about having been herself in the role of Ingrid, the Julianne Moore character: “I’ve been in that situation many times in my life. It’s a graceful thing for me, it’s a privilege.”¹ 

Death and creativity have been linked in Swinton’s work from almost the beginning of her career. This awareness shows up in the seriousness of her work, but also the fun she seeks out. She made seven features and one short with British filmmaker and gay rights activist Derek Jarman from 1986 until his death in 1994. Jarman was her first Martha, the first person whom she sat with while he was dying. “He figured my attitude to mortality,” she says. He was open about dying of HIV in the ‘80s when there was no treatment for the disease and people who had it were treated terribly. In a New York Times interview last December, she goes into detail about that time: 

My first Martha was Derek Jarman. Derek Jarman, when I was 33, died… what Derek modelled for me was something that has really influenced my perspective on the whole charade, if you like, his absolute refusal to look away. There was an exhilaration for him to have the limit of his life made clear to him. He was almost gleeful, and he just drove into the curve and he became enlivened by it. I would say that the last few years of his life, notwithstanding the illness and the pain and suffering that he went through on a physical level, were some of the most joyful years of his life.²

And the films they made together during this time are wonderful. They’re experimental too, punk-rock ballads about a dying England trying to hold itself together through cruel Thatcherism. Jarman’s world she called her “kindergarten”. And true to herself, Swinton has never since lost this experimental, committed and joyful approach to filmmaking. 

It was in her first Derek Jarman, Caravaggio (1986), practically her first film,³ that she found her raison d’être as an actor. In the film she plays a kind of pulchritudinous waif caught up in a love triangle – her boyfriend who is posing for Caravaggio is also having an affair with him. Something unusual happens about halfway through that film when she gains the attention of the great Italian painter, and he buys her a dress for the party. Donning the dress for the first time, she slowly pulls a dirty headscarf off her head, shaking her Venetian blonde locks down onto her back. Then she turns to look straight into the lens, and stares, unblinkingly into it. What we are witnessing is transformation in real time, but it is more than just the transformation of one character. For the first time in her career, Swinton is demonstrating her fearless ability to stare her audience straight in the face – thus turning the lens of her own eye, as it were, back on the viewer. 

Something similar happens in another masterpiece, Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992), and this clever reuse of the technique makes the ending of the film crackle with the flare of an electrical fire. It’s one of the numerous fantastic elements that made this Woolf adaptation Swinton’s breakthrough role. At the end of Orlando, Tilda stares into the camera for a full 20 seconds. The whole weight of the 400-year saga and the deep transformations that came about during the film are focused in Tilda’s enigmatic gaze. It is a space to hold your breath, a space out of time and gender. As in Caravaggio, the secrecy of that look entangles the viewer in the secret, whatever they may choose to see in it. 

“Cinema that imposes a narrative on the viewer is bombastic and egocentric,” she stated in a 2002 interview with Luca Guadagnino.⁴ Through roles as the paradigmatic motivational speaker/dictator whom she embodies in films like Snowpiercer (Bong Joon Ho, 2013), Okja (Bong Joon Ho, 2017), and Trainwreck (Judd Apatow, 2015), she’ll hammer her point to a watching crowd, but one thing she never does is to ham it up to the “real” audience of the film. Tilda might act as a dictator, but she is never going to tell us how we should feel about something.

In The Room Next Door, Swinton doesn’t try to make up for any personal difficulty we face in watching the labour that is death by taking shortcuts. But the visitant in the form of her daughter is a kind wink to a Hollywood ending. When the dying Martha mentions to Ingrid “I was a teenager when I had her”, and Ingrid replies gushingly “she looks just like you”, I was tipped off to the idea that she might also play her daughter in the film, like in The Eternal Daughter (Joanna Hogg, 2020). And indeed, when Martha is no longer, Tilda Swinton does turn up again in the form of Martha’s daughter Michelle, seen in the rear-view mirror of Ingrid’s car, her face getting clearer and clearer as she approaches. As if the actress is saying to the audience, “It’s not that bad, life goes on.” 

This small double role got me thinking about the many times the star has played two roles in one film, and what this says about her career. There are actors whose capacity to carry out such a feat is glorified. Think of Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949); consider Peter Sellars in Doctor Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964). They are undoubtedly both sensational performances, but when it comes to Swinton, this prowess is often mentioned as an afterthought – as if embodying different characters isn’t so hard after all if a woman can do it so easily. In at least six films that I know of, Swinton has played two roles. In all of those films, she has been among the main characters, if not the star of the film. 

In Teknolust (Lynn Hershman Leeson, 2002), Swinton is a genetic scientist named Rosetta Stone who has rather daringly made three cyborg clones of herself. Though the film is a ridiculous and sometimes awkward hodgepodge of silly and immediately outdated ideas about IT, it is great fun. The men who are used for their sperm – “succulent protein” whirr the cyborgs – have to go into a kind of quarantine to be studied like outcasts after barcodes appear on their foreheads; there is talk of bio-gender warfare. At one point the three clones dance for the enjoyment of their scientist mistress, who watches them fondly through the screen of her toaster. Tilda Swinton as Ruby, one of the cyborgs whispers earnestly out of a computer screen, “Loneliness lives on our net frontier, even motherboards and flash require touch. Think of passion every time you click me into you.”

Teknolust

In Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016), Swinton plays twins Thora and Thessaly Thacker as rival Hollywood gossip columnists, and in Okja, the film that turned a thousand (or more) carnivores vegetarian, Swinton plays twins whose rivalry is all-consuming, making them forget to even consider the lives of the people their company exploits. 

Made during COVID lockdowns, The Eternal Daughter cleverly captures that feeling of looking in a mirror time and time again, perhaps hoping to find the surprise of a different person, and instead finding yourself. In one of Swinton’s most impressive double acts, she plays both a middle-aged daughter and her elderly mother. In a nearly empty hotel, they reminisce together about the past as the daughter tries to better understand her mother, learning in the process about a previously unknown family connection with the hotel itself. 

Ironically, their sameness perfectly suggests the impossibility for mother and daughter to ever truly know each other, to see each other as separate people. It suggests the mother-daughter relationship is one of twins, shadows, reflections. Tilda’s repartee with herself is remarkably natural, and each character really appears as a different person. It’s not just accent and costume; the mother’s very way of moving, of using her hands and arms, really does feel old-fashioned. 

In real life, doubles are the stuff of horror and thrillers – they make us uncomfortable. Deeply ingrained in us is the idea that we are each unique. No matter how much we try to conform, there is a need to feel we remain a little different. This is why Tilda Swinton is the ideal person to play around with such tropes. This willingness to “change identity every hour”, as she says,⁵ comes with the package. She’s a natural redhead, her skin is extremely pale, she’s very tall, she looks androgynous, and she’s British but not English. In an age where not trying to blend in has become more of a political statement than ever, Swinton is the ideal double; her differences put her in a smart position to explore human emotion. And audiences love her for it. Hilton Als from the New Yorker wrote about an interview with her back in 2002:

“There is no such thing as a British person,” Swinton avers, aligning herself with the vast number of British subjects—Welsh, Irish, Scots—who once collectively outnumbered those who force-fed them the English ideal. Much of her œuvre can be read as a visual dissertation on such problematics: being non-British, being non-male, being not who-you-are-watching-at-the-time.

Tilda Swinton’s acting is certainly never only one thing. Could it be that playing more than one role is a way for her to prove to herself, and thus to the world, that this ability to change every hour is really possible? When I see Tilda playing a double role, I think back to those direct gazes that punctuate Caravaggio and Orlando. It’s as though they are a sort of challenge on her part to create our own narrative, to wrestle ourselves with the questions about feminism, ageism, the state of the world, and of course, love, that came out of those early, explosively creative years.

Caravaggio

Endnotes