The Great Acting Blog: “Tilda Swinton Has Never Auditioned For A Role”

Apart from for the Royal Shakespeare Company when she was first starting out, Tilda Swinton has never auditioned for a role. Never. All of those wonderful films for artists such as Derek Jarman, Bela Tarr and Jim Jarmusch, and she never auditioned. On her mode of building a body of work, Swinton said:

“Most people don’t develop work the way I customarily do …. they’ll wait for someone to place them into their universe with proper craftspeople. Whereas I spend most of my time sitting around my kitchen table with friends, chewing on ideas and building things that take years.”

Swinton’s example shows us that there are other ways to develop your career, ways where you have more control, enjoy greater rewards and do more of the kind of work you’re actually interested in. Being buffeted around a system upon which you have no control, and where you hold even less value, ends in frustration and failure for the vast majority of actors, and almost none end up doing the sort of work they became actors to do.

As David Mamet told us, going your own way may be more frightening but it’s not less productive.

 

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