Tilda Swinton has revealed that she is taking a temporary break from acting to recalibrate.
The 54-year-old We Need To Talk About Kevin actor has recently finished promoting Joshua Oppenheimer’s forthcoming post-apocalyptic musical film The End at the Berlin film festival, but has said she is hitting pause on acting for the rest of the year.
In an interview with The Guardian, Swinton said she was taking a step “away from certain aspects of cinema”.
Interviewer Xan Brooks remarked that Swinton suggested she “needs time to recalibrate” and figure out “what she needs to do to stay useful”, and Swinton said: “And you really can’t do that when you’re flying around the world, tied to a big carbon footprint. So I’m happy to say I won’t be travelling for months. I’m not shooting another film this year. I’ve been in a spin cycle for much too long.”
She continued: “On the most prosaic level, I’m going to be sleeping in my own bed again. I’ll have a sky and an ocean and human beings around me. It’s not a bunker; it’s home.”
The End follows a billionaire family taking shelter in a luxury bunker as the rest of the world burns down around them.
Swinton plays Mother, a regal woman who claims to have danced for the Bolshoi ballet in her youth. She stars alongside Michael Shannon as Father and George MacKay plays their son.
While at the Berlin Film Festival, Swinton received a lifetime achievement award and used her acceptance speech as an opportunity to mock Donald Trump’s plans to transform Gaza from a “hell hole” into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
Swinton described the “great independent state of cinema” as “innately inclusive — immune to efforts of occupation, colonisation, takeover, ownership or the development of riviera property.”
Swinton continued: “The inhumane is being perpetrated on our watch. I’m here to name it without hesitation or doubt in my mind and to lend my unwavering solidarity to all those who recognize the unacceptable complacency of our greed-addicted governments who make nice with planet-wreckers and war criminals, wherever they come from.”
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Earlier this year, The Independent ranked Swinton as the 20th greatest film actor of the 21st century.
“Swinton is one of cinema’s great chameleons, as believable when playing a mother with a slowly dawning horror about her impossible-to-reach child in We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) as she is the besotted elderly dowager Madame D in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014),” wrote Chris Harvey.