Five brilliantly bizarre performances by Tilda Swinton
Tilda Swinton has developed a reputation for taking on only the most outlandish roles. With her otherworldly features and David Bowie-esque charm, Swinton manages to terrify and mesmerise in the very same instance. These are some of her most bizzare performances from across her long and varied career.
Swinton’s career began with student productions at Cambridge University. After graduating, she landed a gig with The Royal Shakespeare Company. However, she soon discovered that her approach did not correspond with its traditionalist ethos and set about looking for film work.
Around this time, she formed a close working relationship with Derek Jarman, who she would collaborate with until his death in 1994, appearing in Caravaggio, The Last of England, Wr Requiem, The Garden, Edward II, Wittgenstein and Blue.
Swinton’s androgynous appearance made her an obvious casting choice for Sally Potter’s sex-swapping Virginia Woolf adaptation Orlando and Peter Wollen’s Friendship’s Death, in which she starred as an alien robot in the guise of an ordinary woman. Since then, she’s taken all manner of strange and challenging roles. Here we’ve bought you five of the best.
Five brilliantly bizarre performances by Tilda Swinton:
Eve – Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
Nobody quite knew what to make of Only Lovers Left Alive on its release in 2013. Directed by Hollywood oddball Jim Jarmusch and starring Tom Hiddleston in a rather magnificent wig, this genuinely funny vampire movie is as absurd as it is gothic.
Swinton stars as Eve, the centuries-old lover of Adam, a fellow vampire who is deeply depressed with the state of society. When Ava, Eve’s sister, shows up, their relationship is put to the test. Using her rockstar energy, Swinton forges a character at once ethereal and undeniably manic.
It’s important that Adam and Eve’s vampirism is only incidental. This is not a film about bloodsuckers stalking the night, it’s about ageing and how to find meaning in life. Talking to The New York Times ahead of the film’s release, Swinton said: “It’s about what it might be like to be a long-lived person rebooting your curiosity constantly… I don’t think you have to be much older than 26 to know what it’s like to get a little tired.”
Eve Stephens – Female Perversions (1990)
In the 1990s, Tilda Swinton starred in a variety of provocative projects. Inspired by Louise Kaplan’s study of sexuality and fetish, Female Perversions saw the actor take on the role of a straight-laced lawyer who engages in only the most explorative sexual encounters. Faux-Kubrickian set design and messy direction let Female Perversions down somewhat, but Swinton is a wonder.
Eve Stephens is a modern, career-oriented woman with the icy demeanour of the White Witch. She has a boyfriend and a lover who never meet, so her life is filled with passion but ultimately unfulfilling. When her sister, Maddie, gets caught shoplifting, she’s forced to confront the root of all her problems.
Compared to something like Nymphomaniac, Female Perversions isn’t particularly perverse at all. But that’s sort of not the point anyway. The real driving force in this much-maligned offering is how Swinton gradually reveals the inner world of a character who, on the surface, appears utterly emotionless.
Rosetta/Ruby/Marinne/Olive – Teknolust (2002)
Swinton’s second film with artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson, this outlandish and strangely prescient exploration of digital paranoia, is an effervescent time capsule of early 2000s cyberpunk.
Much like Orlando, Teknolust sees Tilda Swinton explore the concept of gender through a series of character mutations which take place in a half-reality somewhere between the digital and the physical.
Swinton plays Rosetta Stone, a bio geneticist who downloads her DNA into an experimental A.I. program, which results in the creation of three self-replicating automatons (SRAs) who can only survive with a regular injection of the male Y chroma found in sperm. On realising this, one of the clones, Ruby, sets on a quest to seduce as many men as possible.
Zelda Winston – The Dead Don’t Die (2019)
In 2019, Swinton decided to take on the role of a Scottish undertaker-Sumaurai-Alien in Jim Jarmusch’s hipster zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die — one of her most bizzare and hilarious characters to date.
Starring the likes of Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloë Sevigny, Danny Glover, Selena Gomez and Steve Buscemi, The Dead Don’t Die invites us to the sleepy town of Centerville, where the moon is hanging low, and the hours of daylight are becoming increasingly unpredictable. It isn’t long before the cause of all this tumult begins rising up unbidden and feasting on the living.
Thankfully, Swinton’s Zelda Winston is “quite confident” in her ability to defend herself against the undead and quickly begins decapitating walking corpses left, right and centre – her highland charm brilliantly juxtaposed with her capacity for violence.
Minister Mason – Snowpiercer (2013)
Few actors have made villainy look quite so grotesque as Tilda Swinton did in the Bon Joon-ho action thriller Snowpiercer. Swinton is nearly completely unrecognisable as Minister Mason, the Rose West-esque second-in-command of the Snowpiercer train, and the voicebox of its creator, Wilford.
Released in 2013, Snowpiercer focuses on the survivors of Earth’s second ice age, who are forced to spend their days within a high-speed train ploughing its way through sheets of snow and ice. Society may have collapsed, but its class structures have survived, with the poorest residents living in the train’s dilapidated caboose. Eventually, Curtis decides to lead a group of revolutionaries through the train and towards the engine room, where they seek to seize control of their future.
Swinton’s character is deeply unnerving and utterly repugnant. Mason was originally written as a “mild-mannered man,” but Swinton convinced Joon-ho to play around with the role. “We just built up a clown,” she told Collider. “I wanted to make a clown out of this politician who is this really sinister, corrupt individual.”
