Honor Swinton Byrne Is on Her Way

I’m on a Zoom with actor Honor Swinton Byrne and I’m holding up the miniature, hand-painted pet portrait a friend did for me of my cat. “Wow, that’s really good,” she says. “I don’t know what your cat looks like, but I can tell it looks just like him.” It’s her turn—she shows me with some timidity a portrait she painted of her dog on a small heart-shaped canvas. It’s also very good and I don’t have to guess whether it looks just like him or not. She scoops up the real-life version—”Pookie, come”—from the chair behind her and holds him up to the camera. “He’s Scottish; he came from Inverness where I grew up, from a litter of nine puppies,” Swinton Byrne recalls. “I went up on the sleeper train to collect him and came back to London on the sleeper train with him, a tiny little thing.”

It’s been just five minutes but now we’re virtual friends, Honor, Pookie, me—my cat. Swinton Byrne apologizes for distracting us, but she didn’t really. This is the point: I want to know about her and what she’s like; it’s why we’re here. We were discussing the pet portraits because making them as gifts for friends is something she does around the holidays each year. It’s become a regular pastime, a creative outlet. “Without sounding too cheesy,” she says. “I think everyone does their own form of art. So to say you’re not an artist, or you’re not arty, you don’t ‘do’ art—I think you should think again.” Beyond painting, Swinton Byrne says cooking and doing her own makeup for events have become sources of creative inspiration too, acts of creativity in which she has freedom to experiment, room to play. By getting a sense for what that experimentation feels like, along with the practice of honing a craft, she’s able to translate that expressiveness into her acting.

The children of playwright John Byrne and actor Tilda Swinton, Honor and her twin brother, Xavier, grew up in the tiny northeastern Scottish town of Inverness (of the Loch Ness and its mythological monster). From the way Swinton Byrne describes it, Inverness is an idyllic place. “I wouldn’t change a thing about how I grew up,” she says. “I’d climb trees and run and play games outside until I was embarrassingly old. It was really free and healthy and lovely.” Growing up, she acted in what she describes as “dodgy school plays,” in which she says she was usually cast as the boy, because she was tall and outspoken—she loved speaking publicly—and she “got a taste” for acting then. Her first screen role was as a teenager playing a younger version of her mother’s character in Luca Guadagnino’s 2009 film I Am Love.

In school, Swinton Byrne studied psychology. Given its connection to acting, she says she would go back and study it over again—it’s her dream subject. “I remember my first lecture, one of the professors said, ‘The great thing about psychology is you never reach the end of the study.’ I think that’s really humbling to know you’ll never complete it, you’ll always want to keep exploring,” she says. I ask her if there was a point in her life that she remembers as particularly formative, something that shaped the way she thinks now. At nineteen, she recalls, she went to Namibia in southern Africa to work as a teacher. “I say I grew up in the middle of nowhere, but I didn’t know what that meant until I went to Namibia. The experience really woke me up, sobered me from this quite sheltered, super safe, super chill upbringing. I was working with these really amazing kids, and that was really—in the middle of nowhere.” Her mom visited seven months into her time there. “She came and saw me and was like, ‘You’re a different person.’”

Over a decade after her debut, Swinton Byrne returned to film in 2019 in Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical The Souvenir, in which she played a film student who becomes entangled in a complicated relationship with an older man. The movie earned eight nominations at the British Independent Film Awards, including one for Swinton Byrne as Most Promising Newcomer. The 2021 sequel The Souvenir Part II was nominated for nine BIFAs. Since then, she has worked regularly, playing Princess Beatrice alongside Michael Sheen and Ruth Wilson in the series A Very Royal Scandal, about Prince Andrew’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein, and a small role in Fuze, David Mackenzie’s new heist film alongside Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Theo James. Earlier this fall, HBO and Sky announced their new legal thriller series, War, with Swinton Byrne in the role of Bella Croft. Shooting is set to wrap in February.

Now twenty-eight, Swinton Byrne describes her current working experience as one of establishing herself, as she still considers herself to be early in her career. “It’s a whole process—just working with lots of personalities and directors, finding out what you need to demonstrate to earn that trust,” she explains. The way she approaches her work is deeply intuition-based, she says, and she describes herself as being in “very much” a period of change. “I feel like I’m in training now,” she explains. “I was never classically trained, and it’s such an art form to have such control and intention behind what you’re doing in the scene. That’s what I’m enjoying now, polishing that up.” That, and establishing her voice: “I think people should be cast for bringing something different and some kind of personality to [a project]. I’m always thinking about what would be the most stimulating and surprising direction to go next, both for myself and whoever’s watching.”

Discussing the current state of the film industry, of which she says she could (but won’t) say many negative things, Swinton Byrne also feels quite positive, inspired by friends who are filmmakers, actors, and directors simply “itching to make a short film or feature and just making it happen for no money. They might never get edited or be seen,” she recognizes, “but just being proactive and not allowing limited opportunities, limited funding, limited meetings or trust from big companies to get in your way—that’s really cool to witness.” As for her, while she’s keeping busy, she’s also wondering what she might do down the line. “I’ve never said this to anyone,” she says, “but I tried writing something and I just couldn’t do it.” I tell her that, as a writer, I’ve experienced this too. “My friends say, ‘Write what you know,’ but I feel like I don’t have anything to write about,” she explains. “‘Oh, but you went to London, your mum is an actor, you could write about this’—but I don’t know if anyone really wants to hear about that. Definitely not me. I feel weird that I don’t have that much to say. But maybe that’s what I should write about.”

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