Proof That Tilda Swinton Is An On-Screen Chameleon

Tilda Swinton doesn’t want you to call her an actress. She wants to be known as a “performer”.

"I feel more like a circus performer than an actress,” she said. “Actress sounds a little pretentious." Whatever Tilda calls herself, she’s the most transformative actress, actor, or performer of her generation. She’s constantly transcending gender and nationality, going from plain to beautiful, young to old, and sweet to the evilest monster who has ever lived. She dabbles in wigs, skull caps, fakes noses, fake moles and fake teeth, and has turned cinema into a game of, “is that really her?”. It's become so prevalent that some have even started calling her transformations “Tildamations” “It's me amusing myself really as no more sophisticated than any six-year-old dressing up as a dog or an old lady,” she said. “It's really just me having a laugh." Right now she’s filming the role of an elderly man in the film, Suspiria. So what better time to examine her most chameleon-like performances?

Tilda looks beautiful in her pristine fur cloak as the White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia. But don’t be fooled, she’s 100% evil. Her eyes will pierce your soul. 

The role of Mason, the dystopian tyrant in the 2013 drama Snowpiercer, was originally written for a man. But director Bong Joon-hof decided to "fiddle" with the character's gender so he could work with Tilda. She would use colored contacts, glasses, a wig, a fake nose, and fake teeth to complement her dowdy costume.

When 54-year-old Tilda hilariously turned herself into the 83-year-old heiress Madame D in The Grand Budapest Hotel, she wore 11 pieces of prosthetic makeup, including hands, neck-piece, chin, earlobes, forehead piece, two nose-pieces and a chin — all topped by five wig pieces.

Some critics have said that there was more than a little bit of Michael Jackson going on with Tilda’s appearance in The Limits of Control, where she plays The Blonde in a cowboy hat, boots, and a trench. 

Coming up, Tilda plays monsters and men who turn into women. 

Orlando, in which Tilda plays the title role of a man who transforms into a woman, was filmed in 1992 and was a sign of her incredible gender transformations to come. 

In Zero Theorem, Tilda plays Dr. Shrink-Rom - a buck-toothed, rapping, virtual therapist, who keeps diagnosing the protagonist with increasingly dire conditions. Her pièce de résistance was the prominent mole on her chin. 

It took fans a while to realize it was Tilda beneath the swishy mane of hair as Amy Schumer’s boss in the delightful Trainwreck. This time, she left the prosthetics at home as she based her magazine boss character on former French Vogue editor, Carine Roitfeld. 

In Doctor Strange, Tilda is a mystical healer who teaches Benedict Cumberbatch the power of magic after he loses the use of his hands in a car accident. 

Tilda excels at vampires as well. 

In Constantine, Tilda is the androgynous angel Gabriel. She cut her hair, which had previously been long, for the career-defining role. This highlighted her magnificent cheekbones and Hollywood came calling.

In Only Lovers Left Alive, Tilda plays a hipster vampire who has perfected her taste in music, art, and literature over hundreds of years. She’s totally elegant – even with the fake vampire choppers.

For Moonrise Kingdom, Tilda oozed authority as a buttoned-up, ginger-haired bureaucratic monster named Social Services.

Right now, Tilda has been transformed into an elderly man, Lutz Ebersdorf, for her latest movie, Suspiria, currently filming in Berlin. Will this be the greatest of all “Tildamations"?

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