The movie role Tilda Swinton referred to as a career “in-joke”
In the early part of her career, it looked as though Tilda Swinton would intentionally confine herself to the realms of art and independent cinema. Her first role was in Derek Jarman’s 1986 film Caravaggio, while she would also feature in the English director’s Aria, The Last of England, The Garden and Wittgenstein, plus several others, over the next few years.
The 1990s saw the London-born actor play for Sally Potter in Orlando, Lynn Hershman Leeson in Conceiving Ada, and Luca Guadagnino in his directorial debut, The Protagonists. For all intents and purposes, it looked as though Swinton would never step foot inside Hollywood, and she seemed to be more than happy that way.
However, after a few notable roles in Danny Boyle’s The Beach, Tim Roth’s The War Zone and Cameron’s Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, Swinton suddenly found herself well admired in the United States, and eventually, a call came for her to join the cast of Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation alongside Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Brian Cox and Maggie Gyllenhaal.
Based on Kaufman’s personal difficulties with adapting Susan Orlean’s nonfiction book The Orchid Thief, Adaptation sees Nicolas Cage play the writer in a serious phase of writer’s block. The film saw widespread critical admiration and earned four nominations at the Academy Awards, including a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for Cooper, who played John Laroche, the arrested horticulturalist protagonist of Orlean’s book.
If that all sounds a bit meta, well, considering it’s a Charlie Kaufman film, who famously wrote Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York, it is. Swinton’s role saw her play a Hollywood executive, and considering the fact that she had rarely, if ever, turned out in Hollywood at that point in her career, the role was considered to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
“It’s a bit of an in-joke,” Swinton once told the BBC. “I’ve been on the other side of the table many times, trying to get people to be sympathetic to projects, and I’ve been the victim of that kind of intense kindness masking extreme stupidity. So I feel I know the territory. It may be unfair of me, but I do feel I know it.”
Of course, Swinton would go on to establish herself in higher budget and Hollywood-produced movies over the next decades, including through performances in the likes of Constantine, The Chronicles of Narnia, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Snowpiercer and the Grand Budapest Hotel, to name but a few, but at the time, Adaptation was one of her first forays into the LA film industry.
Kaufman had Spike Jonze, who had previously handled and won a ‘Best Director’ Oscar for Being John Malkovich, to take care of Adaptation, and Swinton was keen to work with the American director for the first time. “I knew Spike would do something really interesting with it,” she said in the BBC interview before noting the crucial element of the film that made it so unique and interesting.
The actor added, “I think there’s something really profound about the film. It’s about authenticity and whether it’s possible to make anything new. Anywhere. Wherever we are. How possible is it to actually make something authentic? And, of course, it’s difficult enough in Hollywood.” So even as far back as one of her first Hollywood ventures, Swinton understood the difficulty of American filmmaking, which makes her executive character role in Adaptation all the more brilliant and poignant.
