Asked if her Oscar win has had any impact on her career, Swinton is quick to note that having an American film career is not a priority. “Believe it or not, it has never been on my agenda,” she says. “It’s not what I’m really for. It’s a side dish in a great banquet.”
What she is for is collaboration, and she’ll just as readily work with a maverick first-time director as with a veteran if she senses a kindred spirit. “Very early on,” she says, “I knew that I wanted to be in environments where somebody could bring something new into the conversation.” She got her start with the iconoclastic filmmaker Derek Jarman in the mid-Eighties and in 1992 made Sally Potter’s cult classic Orlando, in which she famously played multiple generations of the title character, including a man. Her first Hollywood movie came in 2000, when she starred with Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach. She’s since won critical acclaim for her turn as a mother in The Deep End (2001) and fame as the ice queen incarnate in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Her starting point, she says, is not the character or the script, but her conversation with the director. “She’s oblivious to a film’s commercial potential,” says director Jim Jarmusch, who has written two roles for her. “Acting is not her main interest in life. She’s interested in having all these experiences.”
This summer, for example, she shot Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love, a film that she’s coproducing and that took her seven years to get off the ground. Swinton stars as the wife of an industrialist in modern-day Italy who falls for her son’s best friend. “It’s Visconti on acid,” she deadpans. Michael Clayton director Tony Gilroy suspects that it won’t be long before Swinton becomes a filmmaker herself. “She gets the big smell of a film,” he says, “but she can also dive down into her character and be completely submerged.”
In Benjamin Button she plays an aristocratic Englishwoman, a role for which she “downloaded” her grandmother’s generation. “She’s aware that she has done nothing with her life and is living with it and being incredibly brave about it,” says Swinton. It’s a fate she herself might have faced had she followed the course laid out for her. The third of four children and the only girl, she grew up in a military family that traces its lineage to the ninth century. Her father was the officer commanding the Queen’s Household Division and a major general in the Scots Guards who was stationed at various European bases during her childhood. At age 10 she was sent to boarding school, where she was educated alongside Diana Spencer, whom she remembers well, she says, but flatly refuses to discuss. Being sent away from home hit her hard. “I was very shy and solitary,” she says. “I can’t remember saying much for about five years.”
