Tilda Swinton Is Hollywood's Most Intoxicating Weirdo

Tilda Swinton wanted to put on a special film festival for the people living in the Scottish Highlands. Along with the Northern Irish director, Mark Cousins, and 40 other volunteers, she pulled a mobile cinema on the main roads of Scotland.

Each night, the 35-ton vehicle would be unfolded to create a portable movie theater in a village so that the residents could watch films that they might otherwise never get the chance to experience on the big screen.

Tilda Swinton can trace her lineage back to the Middle Ages. The Swinton Clan, in fact, is one of the oldest families in Scotland. Her great-grandfather is the former Lord Lyon Captain George Swinton, Secretary to the Order of the Thistle from 1926 to 1929, and her father is the former head of the Queen's Household Division. 

The Swintons go all the way back to the ancient Kingdom of Northumberland, and are also one of the first known families to have landed in Britain. 

At a young age, Tilda Swinton was sent to an all-girls boarding school. She hated this experience completely, feeling as if it was just preparing the children there for marriage rather than to be independent or strong women.

The boarding school was so harrowing to her that she believes that she may not have even spoken for around five years from the age of 10 thanks to bullying and a feeling of intense loneliness that came with being away from her family.

Perhaps the strangest thing that Swinton has admitted in an interview is that she had wanted to kill her younger brother when she was a child. In a case of extreme sibling rivalry, she had actually gone into his room with the purpose of murdering him. It turned out, though, that she actually ended up saving his life and no one knew about her killing intent.

"I remembered when I was four or five, I tried to kill my own brother," she said in the interview. "I went into his room to kill him, saw some ribbons from a bonnet going into his mouth, and began to pull them out. And I was discovered saving his life. So I had this strange reputation - my brother's savior - and no one knew I wanted to kill him."

When Tilda was set to be interviewed for GQ magazine as part of a feature that was naming her Woman of the Year, she ended up forcing her interviewer to contact her in a rather strange way. Rather than use emails, she asked to only be contacted with very specific methods. In her message, the actress said, “Please send me a message in a bottle or tied to a pigeon or even to the neck of my white hen, speckled jim, who disappears every night.”

When GQ writer Zach Baron then tried to get in touch using her usual email address, he received an automated message that explained how she would not be available to read it until the year 2070.

During the 2018 festival circuit, critics lauded Supsiria for the phenomenal acting - namely that of Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, and an unknown German actor named Lutz Ebersdorf. Ebersdorf plays Dr. Klemperer, the film's third lead. 

Eagle-eyed viewers believed that Swinton actually played Dr. Klemperer, but any time someone asked Swinton or director Luca Guadaginino if this was true, they denied the claims. In fact, during the 2018 Venice Film Festival, Swinton went as far as to suggest an Oscar campaign for the "private" actor, who was not in attendance.

In October 2018, Swinton came clean in The New York Times, saying that people weren't asking the right question. People often asked Swinton if she was playing Dr. Klemperer, to which she would say no. When Kyle Buchanan at the Times asked if she played Lutz Ebersdorf, however, Swinton said the answer was "an unequivocal yes."