‘Tall and pale with long red-gold hair’, the other-worldly Tilda Swinton was preparing for a suitably alien role when the Observer met her in 1987: ‘An extremely glamorous replica of a human being, a robot from outer space called Friendship.’
At only 26, Swinton already had stints at the RSC, the National and in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio behind her, but although she loved acting, she did not want ‘to become an actor’. It was a profession, she said, that ‘means having low self-esteem and being paranoid… A theatre runs more smoothly when the actors are kept in their place.’ That sat poorly with Swinton who, along with her three brothers, had been ‘brought up to know we could do anything’. That included following her three years at Cambridge with an ‘illegal’ stint in South Africa, working in a Black township, before returning to acting.
Although she had worked almost non-stop ever since, Swinton considered herself not an actor but ‘an artist’. An artist’s role, she explained, was to ‘put up there what you think’ and this current project, Friendship’s Death, would do that. It was a film of conviction, exploring ‘a cause she feels strongly about’: the plight of Palestinians. In it, a computer malfunction brings the robot Friendship to Amman in 1970 during Black September, when the PLO ‘was dealt a crushing blow’ by the Jordanian army. Lost, like the Palestinians, Friendship has ‘no home, no identity’. She has to learn to live among them and ‘eventually she completes the process of humanisation by deciding to die with them’.
It was, she said, with typical grit, ‘A brilliant part. But I would like to ask all the writers who read the Observer why it is that a woman has to play a robot to get a part like that.’ Brushing off a query about marriage (‘It never enters my head’), Swinton saw parallels between her own life and her robot alter ego: ‘At 26, I am, like her, having to improvise. My programming is no longer appropriate.’
