2024-04-30 03:01:00
It was the year 2000 and Hilary Swank I was in a peculiar position. He had won his first Oscar for Boys don’t cry, and had taken the coveted statuette in front of an audience that included Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton and Morgan Freeman. He was what you would call a star. One who came ashore collapsing when she later went to get some medication and was told “I’m sorry, you don’t have health insurance.”
The idea of an Oscar winner without health insurance sounds absurd, I tell Swank over Zoom. The actress, who today he is 49 years old, nods emphatically. “It seems very obvious, right? I win an Academy Award, I’m super famous, everything is glamorous… But I made 3 thousand dollars in the year I did Boys don’t cry and you have to earn 5 thousand to qualify for health insurance. His facialist also assumed that her life had changed overnight. “The next time I went to see her… she asked me if she had gone in the limo! It’s a great reminder that you can’t judge a book by its cover.”
This phrase is a mantra that Swank lives by. She made her name playing people who defy expectations, and watching her now, decades later, without makeup and in a white T-shirt, flashes of those characters still jump out at you without warning. In her generous smile there are flashes of Brandon Teena, the young transgender man which she embodied with devastating perfection in Boys don’t cry, by Kimberly Peirce. And in her eyes it is Maggie, the Missouri waitress turned boxer Million Dollar Babyfor which Swank won his second Oscar (by that time, fortunately, I already had health insurance).
His latest film is no different in that regard. Based on a true story, Ordinary Angels shows Swank getting into the stilettos of Sharon Stevens, a hairdresser from Kentucky who drops everything to help a girl waiting for a liver transplant and a family who can’t pay for it (warning: she’s one to cry, keep tissues handy). Good-natured and determined, Sharon unexpectedly triumphs over the odds, leading the community to help these strangers in need. She thinks of Erin Brockovich but with more beaten hair.
The film highlights the importance of kindness in an era in which their presence in society is reaching its lowest point. She particularly resonated with Swank, whose father was the recipient of a lung transplant in 2014. For three years, she put her career on the freezer so she could be her father’s permanent caregiver. It wasn’t a difficult decision to make, she tells me, even when there were people who warned her not to do it.
“It wasn’t difficult at all,” he says resolutely. “Indeed, it was a blessing and an honor can to do that. Not everyone can take the time off to be in that position.” It was only supposed to be one year, but one turned into two, and two turned into three. “That was fine for me. I wanted to be there as long as my dad needed me,” she says. Even after Swank returned to work, her dad continued to live with her. “My house became theirs,” she says softly. “They were one and the same.” He died in 2021.
Swank believes her return to the screen has been facilitated by the simple fact of her longevity as an actress. “She had only 10 years of career [a mis espaldas]it was 25 years in the business, so I wasn’t really worried about it,” she says. However, Swank has never been the type of actress to work “non-stop.” As she says it, she moves her hands from side to side , like ping pong, to illustrate the monotony. “That’s not something I do, even before I have my babies.”
Oh yes, their babies! Last year, around this time, a few months before my 49th birthday, Swank gave birth to twins: a boy, whom she named Ohm, and a girl, Aya., named after a Syrian refugee he met in Lebanon. In some interviews, Swank has called them his “miracles.” Now beaming, he describes motherhood as “absolutely extraordinary.” A smile spreads across her face, wide and soft like jam on warm toast.
Due to the actors’ strikes, which brought Hollywood to a standstill for 118 days last year, Swank has yet to experience the “working mom” life, but admits the two little ones sleeping next door have raised the bar for what she will accept. . “It’s a double blessing,” she says. “Something is going to have to tick all the boxes to make me want to be a part of it.”
To know Swank’s life story is to understand his weakness for the disadvantaged and the marginalized. She is the daughter of a secretary and a traveling salesman (her father previously served in the Air National Guard, a military reserve force of the United States Air Force). Swank grew up on the proverbial wrong side of Washington. “We call it a trailer park here,” she says. Her bedroom was wood paneled, with a seventies-style brown rug and cream-colored curtains. When she turned 12, she put posters of Michael Jackson, Debbie Gibson and U2 on the walls.
“I think I grew up in a way that a lot of people looked down on.” she says. “Unfortunately, it was many of the adults around me who taught me that it was wrong, and so I learned about classism from a very young age. “I understood that my circumstances were not good enough for some people.”
Other children at the school were instructed by their parents to stay away from Swank and his brother. Now, those same parents stop to congratulate her on the street. “I meet them when I go home and they say, ‘Oh, we always believed in you!'” She rolls her eyes. “I can take the hard way on a lot of things, but in those cases, I say, ‘No, they didn’t. And I’m sorry that whatever you were struggling with wouldn’t let you let me have dinner with your kids and send me home when ‘Everyone else joined the table because I wasn’t good enough. I hope that has changed for you now.'”
Ella He was 15 when his parents divorced and his mother took the leap of faith to move them to Hollywood.. (Swank had been part of an amateur theater group in Washington and was promising as a young actress.) Together they drove to California with $75 in savings, living in their car for weeks until they could pay rent on a small apartment. The risk was worth it; It wasn’t long before Swank got roles in teen television shows as Buffy the vampire slayerGrowing Pains y Beverly Hills, 90210.
Life changed, however, when she auditioned for the lead role in Peirce’s low-budget independent film Boys don’t cry, the true story of a young transgender man murdered in a horrific hate crime, in which Swank was amazing. As the main character, Brandon, Swank conveys the joys of new love and transformation as vividly as he does the immense pain of not belonging. Today, that film and Swank’s performance are mostly hailed as a pivotal moment for representation, but there have been significant criticism over whether it was right for Swank to play a transgender man.
By now, she has her well-rehearsed response, an eloquent response that is both sensitive to the present day and sympathetic to the past. No, she wouldn’t play Brandon again. Yes, she thinks it would be great to have a transgender actor play the role. No, she doesn’t regret it, because she feels honored to have started a conversation in a time of silence. But she also, she does, she believes that actors are actors and she would like to see everyone have the opportunity to play everyone, no matter who she is.
Swank has said something similar in several interviews over the years, always in a way that suggests that, for her, reflecting on the issue is not simply a public relations exercise but a true exploration of her past. Therefore, I choose to use my minutes to ask a different question: What did you learn in the month you spent living as a man?
“I learned that people aren’t so nice when you’re someone they can’t define”Swank responds without hesitation. In the month prior to the start of filming Boys don’t cry, he went out into the world with short hair, compressed breasts and a sock in his underwear and speaking in a low tone, and introduced himself to the neighbors as James, Hilary’s brother. “That was really sad. He opened my eyes to understanding why people react in certain ways: it’s just fear. [La amabilidad] It comes from accepting things that are different to them and what they know.”
“Having traveled the world so much at that point, and having seen so much diversity, I found that response shocking, especially from people who were much older than me. That took a while to get out of the bottom.”
Winning that first Oscar for Boys don’t cry It certainly opened doors, but people weren’t sure where, Swank says. “I think everyone was a little confused about why they would hire me next, because they didn’t know my previous work and the first time they saw me it was as a very androgynous woman,” he says. “But Then my hair grew and people said, ‘Oh, you look like a woman!‘ And I was like, ‘Well, yeah, I’m a woman and I call myself one.’” Eventually, Swank continues, “someone gave me another chance,” but there was definitely an adjustment period. “It took a little while to let people get to know me and see me me.”
And then Swank disappeared again, for the second defining role of her career so far: Maggie, the boxer. For her role as the brave fighter with a heart of gold and courage in Million Dollar BabySwank said He trained for five hours a day and consumed 210 grams of protein daily, including 60 egg whites. Since she had to eat every 90 minutes, she would wake up in the middle of the night to drink a protein shake. Swank put on 25 pounds of muscle for the role, sculpting his body into a vessel of lethal efficiency.
Swank has said that Million Dollar Baby was the hardest thing he’s ever done. And still, she would do it again. “I love working hard,” she says. “I love it. I’m passionate about hard work, and the challenge of transforming and doing something new.” She has previously spoken about the appeal of the transformation at the beginning of her career, when the roles were more one-dimensional. Today, however, she is more reserved. “No, I think what attracts me is being able to walk in other people’s shoes. and being able to see through the eyes of people who might seem different than me,” he says. “It may seem like a big difference, but then you see how connected we are. “We are all here to give and receive love.”
The Independent From great britain. Special for Page 12.