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Tilda Swinton refuses to wear makeup (even for the Oscars)
The Weekly Tilda
Some photos from the upcoming NYTimes "T magazine" Spring 2008
The actress Tilda Swinton does not wear makeup. At the Oscar ceremony, she appeared brazenly pasty, unstained by rouge and bronzer, a white waif in an ocean of spray-tanned limbs and bobbing plastic torsos. Her asymmetrical black dress exposed an ivory arm. The virginity of her unpainted flesh made everyone around her look like a crowd of aging, insecure hookers. I admired her for going without a double deck of fake eyelashes, for braving the television lights without a whisper of powder or blush — for being what passes for naked in Hollywood in front of millions, if not billions, of people.
On television,she looked like a fabulous alien. In person, people must have stopped and stared. Don’t you think the other actresses must have gossiped to one another in the bathroom?
These pictures were taken before her Oscar win as best supporting actress for her role as Karen Crowder, the frigid, calculating corporate lawyer in ‘‘Michael Clayton.’’ ‘‘We were messing around with the makeup, and this is basically what I did,’’ she said in an interview from Seville, Spain, where she was shooting a Jim Jarmusch movie called ‘‘The Limits of Control.’’ She was on a break, eating lunch, even though it was 10 p.m., which seemed tardy even by Spanish standards. ‘‘They call it lunch, because it’s a night shoot, but really they should call it dinner,’’ Swinton said. ‘‘Wait, sorry, excuse me. There’s a dog trying to eat my lunch.’’
With her lashes drooping, eyebrows scrawled on as if by a reckless but deviously accurate child and mouth smeared and unsmiling, she is Pierrot, the heartbroken clown of Italian commedia dell’arte, the cuckold dressed in a white, loose tunic, his mouth a gash of red. In each telling of the story, he pines for but loses his great love, Columbine, to Harlequin (who gets to wear the snappier outfits with the diamond pattern). Swinton wears makeup in this portrait to mock it, its application a farce. Crayons and unguents dare to mimic real beauty; here, she mocks them. They are clearly paint, an overlay, a spackle that disfigures her real face. Any woman who has used makeup can look at this photo and imagine the actual shades in the service of beauty, and realize, with a shudder, that there is nothing more yearning and sinister than a woman’s face covered in carefully applied paint, mascara and shadow.
‘‘As we were putting the tissues around my neck, we eventually realized we were coming to that idea of Pierrot,’’ Swinton said, describing the clown as one of the unconsciously embedded ur-images in every actor’s quiver. ‘‘We didn’t want anything precise or handmade-looking. We wanted a very strong palette of makeup, but nothing that looked too technical.’’ The eyebrows ‘‘were an afterthought. I once played Mozart, in incredibly stylized 18th-century makeup, and they reminded me of that. They also remind me of people who have their eyebrows tattooed on an inch below their hairline.’’
One of the pleasures of participating in a shoot rich with cosmetics, she said, was that she usually tries to avoid them. ‘‘I don’t know how people do it. I take my hat off to them. I think for many people it becomes a kind of armor. I don’t see it as armor, and maybe that’s why I don’t need it.’’
In ‘‘Michael Clayton,’’ her face bore the earnest pall of the career lady, the corporate devotee willing to fall on her sword for ‘‘the Man," her lips drawn in thin lines across her teeth, the musculature of her jawbone pulling the skin taut. In one scene, she sat in a bathroom stall under fluorescent office lights, swabbing her armpits, her expression one of gelid despair, unmoving and unmovable. It was one role where she had what she called ‘‘major makeup.’’
‘‘I imagined her (Karen Crowder, her role in Michael Clayton) as the kind of woman who had this whole makeup design kit I remember seeing in the 1990s,’’ Swinton said. ‘‘You know, like she had gone to visit her sister in Dallas and gone to the makeup counter at Neiman Marcus and gotten a makeover, and the saleswoman said, ‘This is the blush you will wear for life,’ and she goes home and throws out all her other makeup and carefully follows the chart. What is the name of that stuff? You know, where they give you the palette and the chart and you can only wear certain colors? Very 1993?’’
Color Me Beautiful? I replied, cringing at the memory of my own Color Me Beautiful appointment in 1993, which I missed, making my mother angry because I was not taking care of my looks, and wasting her money.
‘‘Color Me Beautiful!’’ Swinton said. ‘‘That’s it!’’
I told her I had nightmares about her after seeing her in ‘‘The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.’’ ‘‘Some people have said that,’’ she said. ‘‘But everyone who is 10 years old and younger loved that character. All of them. They are all masochists.’’
For one of her next roles, she has signed on to play the ‘‘dream wife’’ of Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll. The goth rocker Marilyn Manson will direct and play Dodgson. ‘‘Marilyn Manson’s dream wife,’’ Swinton said, musing, fending off the Spanish dog trying to eat her dinner. Or lunch. ‘‘I don’t know quite what she looks like yet. Nobody does.’’
But you can bet it won’t be a blank slate
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Tilda on Sundance
"Everybody went there to enjoy the crystal waters and the white sand, and they just messed it up with swag bags and studio deals. I actually said I didn't want any swag, and it was not kindly taken. Someone almost said to me, 'Well, what are you doing here then?'"
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Tilda's older lover/babydaddy talks about her younger lover
He has a play coming up that's described as:
"Age difference, other man, media fascination," I say, and before I can ask the question, Byrne adds: "…would seem to chime? Well, the funny thing is I started writing this play in 2002 – before events overtook us. I can honestly say it has nothing to do with me or Tilda… or anyone else we know." But the fact it's being premiered now permits him a wry smile? "Scotch & Wry," he says.
He won't talk about the current state of his relationship with Swinton; the only time he mentions her is to say that he thought her award-winning performance in Michael Clayton was "just wonderful", having caught up with the movie recently on DVD.
Does he, though, understand people's curiosity? "I suppose so, because as a playwright I'm curious about the world and about life. But the writer can make stuff up. I don't bother other people and I wish that they would not bother me." Generally in Nairn, they don't. "It's a town full of old ladies who still go about on their bikes and live as they've always done," he adds with obvious affection.
Is he happy? "I'm pretty happy," he says, before correcting himself. "I'm extremely happy. Without a word of a lie, I've never been happier. What's the point in being cynical? You'll only end up having your cynicism proved right."
Sandro Kopp, as the tabloids like to point out, paints female genitalia. What does Byrne think of his work?
"I wouldn't want to embarrass him," he says with a smile. "He's a sweetheart, a charming man." Doubtless he is, but no more surely than Byrne himself.
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Originally Posted by ingi
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