One Oscar-winning star has announced she will be taking a career break after realising she didn’t like the feeling acting gave her.
Tilda Swinton, most well known for her roles in Narnia and Doctor Strange, has had an uber-successful career, but has decided it’s now time to lay low for a bit after what she calls ‘merciless’ movie-making.
The British star, 64, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for legal thriller Michael Clayton, was presented with the lifetime achievement prize at the Berlin International Film Festival on Thursday for a long career demonstrating ‘breathtaking’ range.
And while her award was impressive, it was her announcement that turned heads.
Having worked regularly for more than two decades, after her debut in the Derek Jarman-directed 1986 art film Caravaggio, she surprisingly told fans she feels as though she is a ‘merciless mistress’ to Hollywood and has been ‘under the lash for a while’.
Speaking at a press conference on Friday, she said: ‘I can tell you that when I go home on Monday to Scotland, I’m entering something that I’ve been looking forward to for about 15 years, which is a period of my life when I do something different.
‘I can’t quite say what it is, but I can say I’m not shooting a film for the rest of this year.’
She added: ‘I want time to develop projects, some are in cinema, some are not, but I need time.’
Continuing to discuss her dislike of certain Hollywood norms, Tilda spoke about working in ‘industrial filmmaking’ and big Hollywood projects, claiming it is ‘difficult for them to relate to each other, as they’re kept away from each other’ in different areas of the set.
The star, who has been in supernatural movie Constantine with Keanu Reeves and drama The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio, said people see it as ‘peculiar’ to hang out with each other on set.
She also addressed comments she made while picking up the prize on Thursday, where she said governments are ‘greed addicted’ and called out ‘the astonishing savagery of spite, state-perpetrated and internationally enabled mass murder’, which she called ‘unacceptable to human society’.
Tilda clarified she was referring to ‘all the wars’, not just the conflict in Gaza, and was also asked about the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS), which calls for a cultural boycott of Israel.
She said she is ‘a great admirer of and have a great deal of respect for BDS’, but added it was ‘more important’ for her to come to the festival and not boycott it – which the organisation called for.
Tilda said she feels she will be ‘potentially more useful to all our causes’ by being there, and called it a ‘personal judgment call, that I take full responsibility for’.
Her latest films include The Room Next Door with Julianne Moore, about two friends who reconnect as one of them goes through terminal cancer, and apocalyptic drama The End.
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