A dark turn

NOT MANY actresses earn two Academy Awards before they turn 40 years old, and yet Hilary Swank is one such woman.

In truth, she is quite possibly one of the least high-profile Oscar winners still at the top of their game, but that is just the way she likes it. The 36 year old has enjoyed a true rags-to-riches story, growing up in the impecunious surroundings of a trailer park in Bellingham, Washington, where at a very young age she learned the cruel truth of people’s preconceptions. Now that’s she’s an A-list star, she’s happy to live a simple life, out of the limelight.

“I noticed other people’s perceptions of me and my family when I was about seven,” begins Swank, “and I was like, ‘My friends’ parents don’t want me playing with their kids, and I don’t understand why.’ Then I started to realise. It was only then that I realised that if you live in a trailer park, other people don’t look on you fondly.”

She says that this experience has affected her development. “It gave me a lot of empathy, and I don’t know if I’d have as much now if were not for that experience. I look around now and I want to help under-privileged kids, and I look at life in a way that I think is very different from how I would look at it if I had been handed a lot of things and not had to work so hard for them. So there is always that silver lining.”

Swank’s silver lining saw her mother relocate her to California in the aftermath of her separation from Swank’s father, where they lived out of their car until Swank’s mother found work and could move them into rented accommodation.

“I have a certain determination,” continues Swank, “and that would come from my upbringing and also from my mom. She didn’t necessarily follow her dreams and she didn’t want the same thing to happen to her child. She instilled in me a belief that I could do anything in life if I applied myself. She never let me say the word ‘can’t’; that was a four-letter, banned word in our house. She wanted me to figure out how to do stuff, not give up. I think that’s where my drive came from.”

She made her first major appearance in the 1994 martial arts movie The Next Karate Kid, and looked set for big things when she scooped the role of single mother Carly Reynolds on hit TV show Beverly Hills, 90210. She was initially promised a two-year deal, but saw her character written out after 16 episodes, claiming in the wake of her dismissal: “If I’m not good enough for 90210 I’m not good enough for anything.”

Her mother’s training kicked in, however, and Swank pressed on undeterred. In 1999 she appeared as the lead in the affecting drama Boys Don’t Cry. She earned the princely sum of $3,000 for her performance, but also won an Oscar, proving that she was more than good enough for 90210.

“It’s funny,” smiles the actress. “People presume there’s a deluge of job offers when you win, but there’s maybe a truth that people make a judgement and possibly wouldn’t offer you certain projects because they’d think you would turn them down. That’s only human. We compartmentalise, that’s how we work through the world.

“I understand why people, when they think of me, might think of only drama rather than comedy. That’s what I’m well known for, but it doesn’t bother me at all. I love doing drama.” She laughs. “And it’s just nice to be known for something.”

She earned a role alongside Al Pacino in Christopher Nolan’s 2002 thriller Insomnia and also appeared in 11:14 and the disaster-movie The Core, before emerging again in 2004, in Clint Eastwood’s boxing movie Million Dollar Baby, for which she packed on 19lbs of muscle, delivering a knock out performance that landed her a second Oscar for Best Actress. Since then she’s earned a Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of suffragette Alice Paul in the HBO movie Iron Jawed Angels.

In the wake of her 2006 divorce from actor Chad Lowe, whom she’d married in 1997 (and forgot to thank in her first Oscar speech), she starred in two films from director Richard LaGravense, the drama Freedom Writers, and then the romantic comedy PS I Love You, shot in Ireland, opposite Gerard Butler and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

“I loved making that movie,” coos Swank, “the locations and of course the cast.” Indeed, she liked Jeffrey Dean Morgan so much that she invited him to star in her latest movie, which opens next week, the duo sharing the screen in a two-hander called The Resident, a claustrophobic thriller from the reborn Hammer Films, which she also helped produce.

“I found The Resident more to be a thriller than a horror film when I first read it,” she explains. “I find all forms of genre entertaining. As an audience member I prefer drama, but I like thrillers and I like to be on the edge of my seat.

“And the story didn’t really remind me of anything that I had seen before, and that was why it was interesting to me. If anything, I guess it reminded me a little of Rosemary’s Baby — it’s set in an apartment building and you don’t really know what’s going on.”

Swank and Morgan have a far more fraught relationship in this film than they did in PS I Love you. “What’s great is that you don’t think of Jeffrey as the bad guy, because he’s like a big puppy dog, and is usually the good guy. So his part in this movie seemed to be something usual.”

This month Swank starts work on her next movie, New Year’s Eve, from director Garry Marshall. “There are lots of little vignettes with different people and I start in a couple of weeks. I’m really excited about it. I’m doing my prep now, it’s a really fun character and there’s no weight to gain or weight to lose.

“It’s a nice, light part. I like to do only one emotionally heavy movie per year, because that’s all I can take physically and emotionally.” So if she’s got time off what does she like to do? “I love a road trip and maybe I’d go see a friend or my family. I’d get a great book and watch movies.” She smiles. “My idea of a great time is cooking and seeing friends, and I love a big meal around the table.”

She recalls the Saturday just gone, which she shared with partner John Campisi, and his little boy. “We had a games night at my house, had a big Italian meal, a three-course pasta-tasting, a lot of wine and then played games. That was with friends and family and it is just the most important thing to me. I like cooking and love baking. I like to keep things simple.”

* The Resident is released on March 11.