Tilda / Bella

Tilda Swinton in conversation with Bella Freud

Tilda Swinton needs no introduction. A cultural icon, the Scottish actress has redefined cinema with her androgynous beauty and fearless performances. From her early experimental work with Derek Jarman to her breakout in Orlando (1992) and her Oscar-winning turn in Michael Clayton (2007), Swinton moves effortlessly between arthouse and blockbuster, with standout roles in I Am Love (2009), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and Asteroid City (2023), to name just a few of her many films. Her latest role in The Room Next Door —Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature and winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival—marks another milestone, cementing her place as one of the most singular and unmatched talents of her generation.

To join the conversation, DUST invited Bella Freud, the London-based designer who began her career under Vivienne Westwood in the 1980s before rising to fame in the 90s with her own cult-favourite brand, celebrated for iconic slogan knitwear like “Ginsberg is God” and “1970.” Born into a legacy of art and psychoanalysis as the daughter of painter Lucian Freud and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, Bella’s intellectual and creative heritage continues to shape her work. Her latest hit podcast, Fashion Neurosis, which has brought her back into the spotlight, channels this legacy with a fresh twist. In sharp, playful 30-minute episodes, guests like Kate Moss, Rick Owens, and Courteney Cox recline on a shrink’s couch to explore fashion as both self-expression and subconscious storytelling. One of the year’s most talked-about podcasts, it transforms neurosis into a witty, thought-provoking exploration of what we wear and why it matters.

In this exclusive DUST conversation, Tilda and Bella take turns interviewing each other while diving into their worlds of cinema, fashion, and creative expression.

Bella Freud – You started your career working with avant-garde directors, and you have waltzed into the mainstream in an exciting way. This way around is unusual. How did you get the beam from the mainstream to shine directly on you?

Tilda Swinton – So funny, put like that… the waltzing… and the beam… I completely understand why you ask this question, but it’s a tricky one for me to be precise about because it feels as if the drift towards a different playing field was pretty organic and almost disguised from me. When Derek died in 1994, I was high and dry without my filmmaking home. And, not being apprised of any real sense of skill or craft outside of my filmmaking relationships, I definitely imagined that I would make no more films and that there would be no other people wanting to work as freely and collaboratively as Derek had. When—first of all, Susan Streitfeld, with whom you and I have worked—various filmmakers came towards me with proposals for fresh adventures, I didn’t always pay attention to what stream they were pitching their work into. Frances Lawrence, for example, who asked me to work on Constantine with him, was an experimental filmmaker—that film was a major adventure for him, which happened to star Keanu Reeves and cost gazillions. Ditto Andrew Adamson, who made The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: he had only made animation films up until that point, and for him, his first live-action film was an enormous departure. So, in the spirit of joining these very nice people on these epic journeys of theirs, I somehow made a couple of films back then that more people got to see than what we’d made before.

B.F. – Everything you do gives the impression of being purposeful. How do you choose? What happens with your instinct when you decide to push yourself into a new realm of artistic expression? How do you arrive at your decisions?

T.S. – I wonder, myself. I suppose the first step is the people: I work in conversation with my collaborators, so that conversation and the people I have them with come before whatever work comes out of it. And whenever the material might be, it has to resonate on some personal—often quite local, recent—level with me. Very often, a project picks up a thread from the last piece of work I made and noodles away in a different way at familiar themes. I think I’m quite dogged in that way; I like to chew the cud from a variety of angles.

B.F. – You are very subtle in how you express your politics. You demonstrate your values with your artistic choices. There is an intense feeling of optimism in what you choose to let the world see of yourself. Are you a naturally optimistic person?

T.S. – I believe I am. I can’t, honestly, imagine any alternative.

B.F. – There is a performance you are able to give that no one else can provide. Do many directors try and claim this for themselves, to signal that their film is an art film?

T.S. – Ha ha ha, what a funny thought! Rent-a-freak! Could that be true? Maybe! How am I to know?

B.F. – How do you choose who to work with?

T.S. – Pure instinct. I am just on the hunt for nice, kind, interesting people who I can imagine hanging out with for months—years—on end, in hotel breakfast buffets, through night shoots, around my kitchen table.. people who I admire and who inspire me and who make my mind work well. I’m incredibly lucky in my fellows. They register as high treasures in my life.

B.F. – The way you wear clothes is like a performance in itself. You use your body as a vehicle, but you always look pretty. This is difficult to achieve. How do you decide what and where to push the boundaries of an outfit?

T.S. – I’m amazed to be described as pretty: Bella, I’m not sure I’ve ever been conscious of having been called such a thing before… as for choosing, I suppose the occasion is always the starting point. It’s something that makes me feel less shy, the idea of, maybe, fitting the context a little. Perhaps the link might be something very tenuous that nobody else could detect, but it gives me something like a sense of security in public situations where I might otherwise feel exposed. A little narrative to suck on…

B.F. – Your hair is often where you express your non-conformist allegiance. You do things like dye your hair white and blonde and shave the sides of your head, styles that no other film star would dare to wear. You don’t sacrifice your beauty, only enhance it. You never seem preoccupied with your hairstyles either. How do you keep your towering quiff in place?

T.S. – My towering quiff! You know, I always had very, very long hair until I was about 40—strange to relate—and yet I pretty much never wore it down, only wound into a bun at the back of my head. I actually kind of hated my hair: I didn’t cut it only because other people thought it was fabulous. Derek was very keen on it… we once teased him terribly on the set of The War Requiem when I casually wandered onto the set with a short wig on. All he said was, “at least you could have let me film you cutting it off…” When I did eventually cut it, I felt so happy and free. It occurs to me that my North Star of a hairstyle is that of my father, who had wonderful thick marmalade hair for most of his life, short back and sides and abundant on top. Very gentlemanly and chic.

B.F. – You are an actor who commits deeply to a role. In your recent role in Almodovar’s The Room Next Door, you play Martha Hunt, a woman dying of cancer. For this part, you lose a huge amount of weight for maximum authenticity. How do you recover from giving so much—do you ever slip over the edge into an abyss?

T.S. – As it happens, The Room Next Door and the task of preparing to play Martha coincided with a period of rocky health in my own life, so I could roll over quite naturally into her shape and the sense of fragility that attaches to her. If it isn’t too perverse to say, this is just how I would have liked it to be anyway—authentic and minimum acting required… It isn’t really a question of recovery for me, though, ever. Like you, I have read and heard actors talk about their immersions and how hard it can be for them to ‘leave it behind’. For me, the opposite seems to be true: I dump my psyche into my work and then slip off at the end of the daylight as air.

B.F. – What things do you look forward to eating?

T.S. – There are things I’m sad to say I won’t be able to gorge myself on this Christmas—brandy butter by the teaspoon and Christmas cake with cheese—but those feasts live in my memory, and I can nibble on them in my mind, ad infinitum.

Now it’s my turn to ask the questions. Do you remember when we first met?

B.F. – We first met in 1995 when you and Susan Streitfeld asked me to design the wardrobe for Female Perversions, where you played the main character.

T.S. – Susan and I were both eager to have you on board. I was already so devoted to what you were making—a purity and crispness of line and colour that felt incredibly original and fresh—and it was such a massive coup for us that you agreed. The clothes worn by the woman I play in the film contributed such resonance and texture: they were a psychological portrait in themselves. What do you remember of that work and how it figured at the time in your life and development as an artist?

B.F. – I remember vividly. Even where you were standing in the room when we were discussing what your character would wear. It was such a surreal moment to be doing something so momentous—with you. I remember that we wanted colours for your clothes that were the colour of your skin. Your skin is so transparent and pure. It shows all your thoughts as you think them, like the purest water. I had the fabric specially dyed. It was a Venetian wool in a palest oyster-coloured taupe with a sheer sheen. I remember how everything made so much sense when we talked about it. Then, seeing how you looked in the film, it was almost a shock that the idea you described was so viscerally present exactly as you had envisaged it.

T.S. – When did you start making things, and what were they?

B.F. – I moved to Rome in 1983 to study fashion and live with my great love of the time. I had been reading about Coco Chanel and was smitten by everything about her—including that sand colour she was crazy about. I met a woman who had a knitting machine in her flat on the top floor of a tower block. I started making little knitted tailored outfits. I still do that.

T.S. – What is your favourite part of the creative process?

B.F. – I love fittings. It is the time when I get to shape something. The hardest part has been coming up with the idea. The fitting shows whether it has legs or not. Even when it doesn’t, there is the opportunity during the fitting to have more and better ideas and to transform something. And the more I do fittings, the more my aliveness springs to life, and I seem to know what to do.

T.S. – Having built up such a practice over the last thirty years, what do you draw on these days for inspiration and nourishment?

B.F. – I am going back to reading like a maniac. I read a lot as a child; then when I lived in Rome, I was quite lonely and sometimes bored. There was an English bookshop just off Piazza di Spagna; I read everything—novels, especially 19^th century French, Russian and English. My favourite genre. The internet interferes with reading, as going on Instagram is so addictive, and so is the NY Times Spelling Bee. But now, culture is more essential than ever—as a way of bearing the extreme cruelty that is being normalised, both in how it is reported and allowed.

T.S. – Tell me about the genesis of your podcast Fashion Neurosis…

B.F. – It came from wanting to tell stories about how brilliant, funny, and ingenious so many people in fashion are. There is a lot of loyalty in the fashion world that is never shown in the media. We are one-dimensional to them—and it’s partly because it’s easier to resort to a cliché. Of course, there are some major bitches, but it’s much wittier and deeper than that. I wanted to show how we reveal or hide ourselves through what we wear. I find that fascinating.