Tilda Swinton and Haider Ackermann are wearing almost-identical blue and white checked Bhutanese robes. Almost. The actor points to her roomy, rolled-up white cuffs. “Mine doesn’t have the blue,” she says. The designer thumbs the deep blue edge of his sleeve across the video call, in a sparsely decorated white room in his Paris apartment. “We were lucky enough to be together in Bhutan,” explains Swinton. “I can’t do the maths, something like four years ago? Maybe longer … They’re very useful. Of course, they look very Scottish.” During their friendship of nearly 20 years, the pair have entwined work, play and travel since they first crossed paths – though neither remember exactly when that happened. Their coming together was perhaps inevitable: they are both, in their respective fields, maverick.
Swinton’s breakthrough role in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio [1986] was the beginning of an enduring artistic relationship: the actor went on to appear in five more of the groundbreaking director’s features (as well as being a narrator for Blue [1993]), and the two were close until his death in 1994. Forging her position as a coveted cult performer, Swinton has become a regular collaborator with auteurs Luca Guadagnino, Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, the Coen brothers and Bong Joon-ho, and has staged experimental performances at MoMA and the Serpentine Gallery. Moving between genders, ages and even species on-screen (the roles of witches, a vampire and a dog
