Tilda Swinton is right about weird Barbies and reluctant slinkies

polygon.com:

Tilda Swinton is the sort of actor whose presence on screen makes a film a little more beguiling. Whether she’s playing someone otherworldly, like the vampire burnout Eve in Only Lovers Left Alive,or someone more grounded, like the academic Alithea in Three Thousand Years of Longing, there’s something ethereal about the way she inhabits a character, as if she’s always been there, waiting for the story to show up around her.

However, in Problemista — a surreal New York fairy tale starring writer-director Julio Torres as Alejandro, a young man facing deportation after losing his job — Swinton is more arch than usual. Her character, Elizabeth, is a fickle art dealer Alejandro begins working for in a desperate attempt to land a work visa as he clings to his dream of one day making strange toys for Hasbro. Elizabeth is frustratingly noncommittal about sponsoring him, perhaps due to her erratic nature, or some deeper pain on her part — Problemista is partly a story about these two unusual souls coming to understand each other.

Recently, Swinton spoke with Polygon from her New York hotel in support of the A24 comedy, in a brief yet wide-ranging conversation about difficult bosses, the misery of the immigration queue, and how work desensitizes us to each other.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Polygon: This is such a warm film, and yet your character is so abrasive!

Tilda Swinton: Oh my Lord. Well, you know, she came out of Julio Torres’ head, what can I say? And I gather his experience as well. So it’s been really extraordinary, because […] pretty much everybody has had that boss. It’s quite triggering, particularly the whole FileMaker Pro abuse scenario [in the movie]. There are a lot of people who feel that the film was made about their life story. Do you have an Elizabeth, Joshua?

I’ve had Elizabeths in my life, yes. I also wondered what horror story Julio had experienced with FileMaker Pro, since the difficulty of that program is so