HONOR SWINTON BYRNE

“THE SOUVENIR”

Plenty of Hollywood scions find their way into the family business. Not all of them break through in a film sharing scenes with their Oscar-winning mother. Swinton Byrne, daughter of Tilda Swinton and playwright and artist John Byrne, has done just that by headlining her mother’s childhood friend Joanna Hogg’s Sundance darling “The Souvenir,” a piece of art that is also an emotional and semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story.

“Swinton Byrne beautifully plays a formless woman at varying stages of self-awareness, her backbone forming before our eyes as her heart splits into fragments,” Variety’s Guy Lodge wrote of the 22-year-old in his review of “The Souvenir.” He also describes her on-screen chemistry with co-star Tom Burke, who plays her character’s elder and troubled suitor, as “intensely interlocked.”

No one may be more surprised by this career choice than Swinton Byrne herself. Apart from a non-speaking role in 2009’s “I Am Love,” directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring her mother, her screen time has been limited. Born in London and raised in the Scottish Highlands, she told W magazine that her mother and Hogg approached her for the part, and that while she “was really sure that it was what I wanted to do” she also “really, really didn’t see it coming.”

Turns out mom did know best. Swinton Byrne will reprise her role in the upcoming “The Souvenir Part II.”

— Whitney Friedlander

REPRESENTATION: Agency: Hamilton Hodell (U.K.) INFLUENCES: Bong Joon Ho, Jeff Goldblum, Tilda Swinton, Jodie Turner-smith