Tilda Swinton

Oscar-winning actress

“There’s usually a stone in my pocket and heather in my hair”

Tilda Swinton has for decades been one of the most striking, instantly recognisable presences at the world’s biggest film premieres and fashion shows. But home for the Oscar-winner is somewhere far less glitzy – the Scottish Highlands, with an even more remote island retreat in the Hebrides off Scotland’s northwest coast. At the latter, her perfect day involves the simple pleasures of waking up, deciding what to cook and which games to play, plus walking and gazing out across the water to other quiet islands. In the former, she is the proud custodian of both her parents’ garden, with its ancient apple trees, and now her own…

“I came down yesterday from my own garden in Scotland and here I am in this garden created courtesy of Pirelli”

Swinton’s pleasure in nature makes her shoot among flowers and plants for the 2026 Pirelli Calendar the perfect setting and she is equally thrilled to have been asked to participate by her longtime collaborator, this year’s Cal photographer Sølve Sundsbø…

“He’s really an artist, incredibly inventive and fantastical, but supremely practical at the same time. We always have our minds blown with Sølve; it emboldens the strong vision in everyone who works with him”

While she describes the Pirelli Calendar as “a world of mystery, so iconic”, Swinton is clearly relaxed working in this environment with Sundsbø, even using a 360-degree camera previously unknown to her. It’s something she credits to the photographer’s ethos of creating a sense of play and her sense that “we made something I’ve never seen before, that’s a good feeling”. For Swinton, teamwork has always been key…

“In a way I was too spoiled by my early experiences of relaxedness with a collective: Derek Jarman, and other friends and colleagues I worked with 40 years ago, some of whom I’m still working with. You trust each other, you feel known by each other”

Having friends and colleagues around her who she considers sympatico has been a cornerstone of Swinton’s success since she first worked with the director Derek Jarman in the early years of her career, staying close to him until his death in 1994 from AIDS-related illness. She remembers his encouragement to “always carry her own light” – both literally for low-budget filmmaking and metaphorically. She stresses that long-term collaboration is immensely important to her, and she still works with makeup artist Morag Ross and costume designer Sandy Powell, who she met on the set of her very first film, Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986).

“I’ve always gone out of my way to look for people first”

Such an approach has served Swinton well, meaning she is in demand for blockbuster movies such as Doctor Strange (2016) and Avengers: Endgame (2019) while remaining committed to more independent work, such as the recent The Souvenir Part II (2021), in which she acted alongside her daughter Honor Swinton Byrne and was nominated for a BAFTA Scotland award. Of her own skill in navigating such a competitive industry, Swinton is both unassuming and entirely unabashed.

“It’s not competitive at all, because who can compete? You’re unique. You don’t have to work hard to show a side of yourself because there are no sides to yourself, you’re just round”

Indeed, there is nobody more unique on the red carpet. With her flawless porcelain skin and unwavering gaze, Swinton stands out even among the world’s biggest stars – so it comes as a surprise to hear her describe herself as extremely shy.

“For a shy person who’s chosen or has been swept into this extraordinary slipstream, I’m extremely lucky to have such incredible fellows. I never go on a red carpet without my band around me. I never step out there by myself, which means I’m either with my colleagues presenting a piece of work or I’m there with my band of whomever I’m fortunate enough to be with, who’s dressing me, my team scrubbing me up, making me look less like I came from under a hedge”

And that presence shines through in her answer to our final question: what is her definition, in a nutshell, of beauty?

“I would say relaxedness. More than relaxation, relaxedness. Absolute chill. Sometimes it’s not easy for people to be relaxed; people have to labour at it. It’s a choice to do the work, but it’s the treasure. Isn’t that what we all want, to be in the presence of relaxed people? Because that makes us relaxed ourselves”.