Hollywood star will never have a part quite like it
Tilda Swinton insists on full-body prosthetic disguise for the role of elderly German actor
METHOD acting is part of the skill set of many Hollywood stars. But in her latest film, Tilda Swinton went to quite some lengths.
The actress has finally confessed to one of the film world’s worst-kept secrets – that Lutz Ebersdorf her elderly “co-star” in the new film Suspiria, was actually Swinton in disguise.
And while she spent four hours in make-up each day to recreate the wrinkled face of octogenarian Ebersdorf, the prosthetic disguise also extended below the waistline.
“She did have us make a penis and b----,” said Mark Coulier, the Oscarwinning make-up artist who created Swinton’s look. “She had this nice, weighty set of genitalia so that she could feel it dangling between her legs and she managed to get it out on set on a couple of occasions.”
Swinton and Suspiria’s director, Luca Guadagnino, spent two years maintaining the illusion that Ebersdorf was a real man – an 82-year-old making his belated film debut as German widower Dr Josef Klemperer.
Even when paparazzi photographs surfaced of Swinton in disguise, the pair denied the story. And when the film had its premiere in Venice last month the actress read out a statement purporting to be from Ebersdorf who described himself as a “private individual who prefers to remain private”.
However, she has now come clean to The New York Times.
Asked why she had pretended to be Ebersdorf, she replied: “Undeniably, I would have to say, for the sheer sake of fun above all. As my grandmother would have it – a motto to live and die by – ‘Dull Not To’.”
She said: “Frankly, my long held dream was that we would never have addressed this question at all. My original idea was that Lutz would die during the edit, and his ‘In Memoriam’ be the final credit in the film.”
There were also more artistic reasons for the gender switch. The character in the film was a widower and Swinton said: “Klemperer is inhabited by the phantasm of his lost wife. He is, in this crucial respect, ‘played’ by a woman. She dictates the rhythm of his life in the everyday texture of his bereaved loneliness.”
The film stars Dakota Johnson as a young woman who joins a dance troupe led by a coven of witches. In addition to pretending to be Ebersdorf, Swinton plays Madame Blanc, a dance instructor.
Guadagnino said the film was female-centric so it felt right that no man had a major role. Casting Swinton in the male role ensured that “there will always be this element of femininity at its core. Being a film about the fantastic, it was important that we did not play by the book.”
On set, many crew members and extras had no idea
‘Being a film about the fantastic, it was important that we did not play by the book’
that Ebersdorf was really Swinton, so realistic was her make-up. Guadagnino said: “They were all like, ‘Is this a famous actor, Lutz Ebersdorf?’ They’d go on [film website] IMDB looking for him, and there wasn’t any information.”
Coulier said it was challenging to turn Swinton, 57, into a man for the remake of the 1977 horror classic from Dario Argento.
“Although she has a slightly androgynous look from sort of a fashion-model point of view, Tilda’s got a very feminine bone structure,” he said.
Asked where Swinton’s more personal prosthetics are now, he said: “Probably in a box somewhere. I should try and find it, and put it on a plaque on the wall of my workshop.”