Tilda Swinton Inhabits Dual Roles In The Trailer For The Eternal Daughter
After a bittersweet turn in George Miller's "Three Thousand Years of Longing," Tilda Swinton is preparing to grace movie screens once again before the end of the year. In the upcoming A24 mystery "The Eternal Daughter," Swinton portrays a woman trying to care for her aging mother — as well as the mother herself.
A glimpse of Swinton's dual performance can be seen in this recently released trailer for the film. As Deadline reported in 2021, the film was shot "in secret" in Wales during the COVID-19 pandemic, and was executive produced by legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese. The writer-director behind "The Eternal Daughter" is Joanna Hogg, who previously collaborated with both Swinton and Scorsese on the two-part romantic drama "The Souvenir."
From A24's own website, the story of "The Eternal Daughter is described thus — "An artist [Julie] and her elderly mother [Rosalind] confront long-buried secrets when they return to a former family home, now a hotel haunted by its mysterious past." As Time recounts in their film review, Julie is a successful filmmaker who secretly hopes this return will make for compelling art. Playing her own mother — with whom she has a duplicitous relationship — may seem like an unnecessary challenge at first, but Swinton is adamant that this curious casting was vital to the movie.
Playing Rosalind and Julie was fun for Swinton
Speaking to HeyUGuys on the London Film Festival red carpet, Swinton described her experience playing both Julie and Rosalind as "fun," "beautiful," and "important." "The nature of this film..." she said, "...it is important that the two roles are played by the same person. I've done that before. But you know what? It's no different to playing a different role in a different film..."
Swinton notoriously played two roles in the 2018 remake of "Suspiria," in which she played Madame Blanc and Dr. Josef Klemperer — or, rather, as she told the New York Times, she played Lutz Ebersdorf, the actor who played Dr. Josef Klemperer. If that sounds a bit ridiculous, Swinton admits that taking on both roles and attempting to maintain some secrecy about it was all an elaborate bit of fun (per Screen Rant).
Her attitude toward playing dual roles in "The Eternal Daughter" is similarly relaxed and blunt, telling HeyUGuys "...[playing both roles is] easy, it's fun. It's dressing up and playing, and the only issue here was just practically, you know, talking to oneself and remember the way in which one spoke to oneself. That was a little bit of mathematics. But no, it was beautiful."
See Tilda Swinton embody both mother and child in A24's "The Eternal Daughter," in theaters December 2nd, 2022.