17 Times Tilda Swinton Completely Transformed For a Role

Swinton’s big screen debut was in a movie called “Caravaggio,” a biography of the Italian painter. Her aesthetic as Lena, Caravaggio’s romantic interest, is considerably tame compared to her later film looks.

Swinton returned to period films several years later, playing the gender-bending role of Orlando, an androgynous young nobleman with eternal youth who wakes up one morning as female. The Lady Orlando must then defend her inheritance and learn how to live. “Orlando” is loosely based on a Virginia Woolf novel, “Orlando: A Biography,” which is a satirical history of English literature.

Seeing double? Tilda Swinton actually plays four roles in this low-budget film about a scientist who clones herself. She plays Rosetta Stone, a scientist who inserts her DNA into three Self Replicating Automatons (S.R.A.s), clones who must go out into the world to acquire their supply of Y chromosomes to keep themselves alive.

The White Witch is one of Swinton’s most famous roles – it’s also one of her most extreme looks. She is the main antagonist in “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” based on C.S. Lewis’s beloved fantasy series of the same name, and she forces Narnia into an eternal winter.

Swinton plays Katie Cox, the wife of John Malkovitch’s former CIA analyst Osbourne Cox, in this dark spy comedy. The frustrated wife is one of many interesting characters in this star-studded Coen Brothers film.

Swinton simply plays a character named Blonde in this artistic film made by Jim Jarmusch. The movie is about an assassin on a strange mission in Spain, guided by phrases such as, “Everything is subjective.”

Swinton shines here as the mother of a boy with psychopathic tendencies, trying to understand her son’s violent actions. The movie is based on a novel of the same name by Lionel Shriver, which is written from the perspective of Swinton’s character, Eva.

Swinton looks relatively down-to-earth in Wes Anderson’s pastel-coloured comedy, but her character, Social Services, does have a very distinct look. The movie is about a young orphan who escapes and runs away with his pen pal, and Swinton introduces an impressively stern and severe persona in this role.

Swinton is downright unrecognizable as Mason, the mysterious figure who keeps the poor from getting to the rich in Bong Joon-ho’s insane, post-apocalyptic thriller. Some prosthetics and giant glasses help turn her into the second in command of a train that relegates the wealthy to the front cars and the poor to the back. Once again, she plays the villain here – and plays it well.

After “Moonrise Kingdom,” Swinton reteamed with Anderson for his next film, playing an elderly woman with an active love life. Not for nothing, the film won best achievement in makeup and hairstyling at the Oscars, with Swinton’s transformation into an elderly wealthy dowager being particularly impressive.

We could barely believe Tilda Swinton was under all that makeup in “Trainwreck.” She played the boss of Amy Schumer’s character, an outlandish magazine editor with few to no morals. Seeing her with dirty blonde hair and a tan is deeply disorienting in its own right.

In “Doctor Strange,” Swinton appeared bare-faced, bald, and as beautiful as ever. She starred as The Ancient One in the Marvel film opposite Benedict Cumberbatch, and took on the role, again, in “Avengers: Endgame” in 2019.

Swinton teamed up with Boon Jong-ho again for “Okja,” about a girl who comes to the rescue of a genetically modified pig. Swinton maintains her streak as a villain here, playing Lucy Mirando, CEO of the Mirando Corporation, who wants to profit from Okja.

Swinton played not one but two roles in “Suspiria,” a remake of the terrifying 1977 film about a very haunted ballet school. She plays the director of the ballet troupe, Madame Blanc, as well as the elderly male Dr. Josef Klemperer, who investigates the supernatural occurrences in question.

Swinton appeared alongside Selena Gomez in “The Dead Don’t Die,” about a small town fighting zombies. She plays the elderly Zelda Winston, a funeral home owner and resident of the town.

Swinton plays J.K.L. Berensen, a writer, in “The French Dispatch,” director Anderson’s tribute to early New Yorker stories.

Swinton plays professor Alithea Binnie in the supernatural film “Three Thousand Years of Longing” alongside Idris Elba. Her character kicks off the magic by opening up a bottle, which unleashes a djinn, a creature similar to an angel or genie.