Tilda: I’m probably a woman
Dr Strange actress on ’finding her queer circus’ with painter lover and Scots father of her kids
OSCAR and Baftawinning Scottish actress Tilda Swinton has declared she is “queer”.
Swinton – who is currently in a relationship with painter Sandro Kopp and shares twins Honor and Xavier, 23, with artist John Byrne, 81 – spoke of “finding her circus” and said her experience with identity is to do with “sensibility”.
In February’s issue of British Vogue, the narrator said: “I always felt I was queer – I was looking for my queer circus and I found it.’
The Nairn-based star, 60, also touched on her close relationships with industry colleagues, among them an array of directors, as she added: ‘I’m very clear that queer is, for me anyway, to do with sensibility. And having found it, it’s my world. Now I have
a family with Wes Anderson, I have a family with Bong Joon-ho, with Jim Jarmusch, with Luca Guadagnino, with Lynne Ramsay, with Joanna Hogg.”
On gender, the Doctor Strange star said in the past: “I don’t know if I could ever really say that I was a girl – I was kind of a boy for a long time. It changes.
“That whole idea of transformation is at the heart of what I’m interested in as a performer and not least through the idea of gender. It’s a very personal matter. I can categorically say, I’m probably a woman.”
The actress also told journalist Vera von Kreutzbruck in 2009: “I enjoy walking the tightrope of identity, of sexual identity, of gender identity.”
Elsewhere in her new interview, Swinton said she “never had any ambition as an artist” before her successful career, adding: “If you’d asked me when I was 10 or 20, I would have said my only ambitions were to live in a family, to have friends that made me laugh and laughed at my jokes, and to live in the Highlands of Scotland, by the sea with a lot of dogs and a kitchen garden. Seriously.
“And I have been blessed to be able to achieve them. Everything else is just icing and candles and flowers.”
Read the full feature in the February 2021 issue of British Vogue, available now.