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Possessing an ethereal beauty and an eclectic taste in movies, the striking redhead Tilda Swinton is not usually a Hollywood contender. Yet when the Scottish actress donned a suit in Michael Clayton last year, her precise way of talking was perfect for the ruthless corporate boss she played, and she won the best supporting actress Oscar for her performance.
Incredibly, Swinton, 47, had never seen an Oscar telecast as she doesn't have a television in the tiny town of Nairn, where she lives in north Scotland. Now that she has been to the Oscars and won, she can't remember a thing about it.
"I went into a kind of a coma at a certain point," she recalls, in her forthright manner. "I have yet to see any footage of it. I came back and I went home and I've been working ever since, so it's like a strange dream. You could tell me anything, that I threw up over my dress, and I would believe you. I don't remember it. It's horrible really."
Getting up in front of three billion people would surely make the most confident of celebrities nervous, yet Swinton, the daughter of a military general and educated in an exclusive English boarding school, doesn't let it show for a minute. When she was on the Cannes jury with Quentin Tarantino she seemed to have the former boy genius for dinner and she is a fine match for that other confident talker, George Clooney, her rival in Michael Clayton and now her bed partner in the Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading, which opened the Venice Festival.
How does she keep up with Clooney? "I think he thinks I'm a man," she quips, going on to explain: "I'm taller than him. I can beat him up quite easily."
Clooney must find it hard to win an argument with her? "He's never tried. I should maybe take that as a compliment."
They're of course now good friends and Swinton has even been invited to Clooney's much-talked-about Lake Como villa. "It's everything you might imagine in your wildest dreams," she coos.
As one might imagine too, their Burn After Reading love scene was quite an experience. "It was very hard to do that stuff and keep a straight face," she admits. "When I saw it I was amazed, because I'd only ever seen takes where at some point someone cracked up. So to see that they managed to cut together an entire scene with nobody laughing was impressive to me."
Burn After Reading is a very silly film, the third in the Coens' "trilogy of idiots" films (after Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty) all starring Clooney. This third instalment marks the brothers' attempt at a spy thriller and in the process they take a swipe at the Washington way of doing things, even if they will never admit to it.
"I think it's a Swiftian nightmare really," says Swinton. "It's a very serious film about a kind of paranoia which is not exclusive to the United States of America in that particular milieu, but it is a speciality of the house, let's say."
In the story, Swinton's shrewish, power-dressing doctor is unhappily married to sacked CIA analyst John Malkovich. When Malkovich's memories fall into the wrong hands namely the intellectually-challenged fitness trainer Brad Pitt and his gym employee Frances McDormand the lives of all the characters spin out of control. Swinton is intent on divorcing her husband so she can marry Clooney', who plays a US marshal and who also has a spouse.
"There's something really, really funny in terms of my character being so angry all the time," she says.
At the film's Venice premiere, Swinton, perched between Clooney and Pitt in the celebrity hot seats above the crowd, was not beyond being silly herself. As Pitt's grinning face was plastered in close-up on the huge movie screen (he was belatedly receiving his best actor award for The Assassination of Jesse James from last year), Swinton thrust her long jewel-encrusted finger up his nose.
"That was me? I don't know that it was," she protests in a rare coy moment in our interview. The playful trio were eventually given headphones to force them to listen to the boring formalities in Italian, in the hope that they might behave themselves.
As usual, Swinton, in the top 10 of this year's International Best-Dressed List, looked stunning. Having functioned as the muse and mascot of adventurous Dutch fashion designers Viktor and Rolf (who made an entire collection inspired by her in 2003), Swinton admits they're "now great friends of mine". Though it's not as if she ever sticks to one designer.
As with all aspects of her life, in her movies Swinton has never been one to follow the status quo. Her long professional partnership with the late Derek Jarman, the British experimental filmmaker who was openly gay when few creative people were brave enough to admit it, was her guiding light in movies including Caravaggio and The Last of England. After Sally Potter's gender-bending 1993 film Orlando launched Swinton onto the world stage, she ventured to Thailand for The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio and she bared it all for the cameras with Ewan McGregor in Young Adam. "I've never needed to follow rules,
I've never signed up to things and I'm the lucky one! But I do think all the time about what it must be like, particularly if you start to break out, are miscast and want to change. It must be very painful."
She did venture into the mainstream when she came to New Zealand to play the evil, ethereal witch in the Hollywood blockbuster, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. She fell in love with New Zealand because it resembles Scotland's north. "It feels like another home to me," she admits. More importantly, while here she fell in love with Sandro Kopp, a handsome 29 year-old German/Kiwi artist working as an illustrator on the film.
"He's a painter and he was drawing everybody," she notes. Did they go off into the wilderness together?
"Now then, now then," she says admonishingly. "We were all in the wilderness together but don't say that I slept with him. There were 1500 people there, for God sake!"
Previously, Swinton had been in an 18-year relationship with 68-year-old artist John Byrne, and much has been made of their ability to continue to co-habit and raise their 10-year-old twins Xavier and Honor together in Nairn. "I've been with Sandro for four years and John and I haven't been a couple for over five. My children have known and loved Sandro for almost half of their lives. Maybe the unorthodox thing, it's sad to say, is that were all so happy and this comes as a shock to people. When you say that you love the father of your children and you also are in love with someone else, they immediately assume you're all in bed together. The idea that you have to defend yourself seems really sad."
With two more films under her belt (the Italian drama I Am Love and Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control) she is now shunning acting to produce several projects of her own. In her Highland hometown she recently funded her own very successful film festival: The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams, where she personally introduced and showed an eclectic mix of classics and rare films from around the world.
"It was eight and a half days of complete madness where people got in for a tray of home-baked cakes," she enthuses. "It rocked!"
* Burn After Reading opens in cinemas October 16.
