**Slight spoilers ahead for Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” remake**
Finally, after months of speculation (which we must admit, wasn’t tough to dig up as it was probably the worst-kept secret in the entire production of the film), Tilda Swinton and filmmaker Luca Guadagnino are ready to come clean about the actor known as Lutz Ebersdorf.
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For those not aware, Ebersdorf is the unknown actor who portrays Dr. Josef Klemperer in the new film “Suspiria.” However, since first images appeared of the mysterious actor no one has ever heard about, many fans believed that Swinton donned tons of makeup to pretend to be Ebersdorf. Now, after months of avoiding the question, the actress reveals the truth — everyone was right.
That being said, it was never her intention of hiding the fact that she is the real Lutz Ebersdorf. In fact, she would have gladly explained it to anyone…if they asked the right question. You see, people have been asking if she’s playing the role of Klemperer. But they should have asked another question. Is she the one playing Ebersdorf. If the actress was asked the right question, Swinton would answer with “an unequivocal yes.”
When asked why she took on the task of having multiple roles in “Suspiria,” including being mysterious about Ebersdorf, she replied in a new interview with the New York Times, “Undeniably, I would have to say, for the sheer sake of fun above all. As my grandmother would have it — a motto to live and die by — ‘Dull Not To.’”
Swinton further explained, “A psychoanalyst, or a psychiatrist with a sense of the unconscious, is someone who knows that in every delusion is an attempt to tell a truth. Klemperer is inhabited by the phantasm of his lost wife: He is, in this crucial respect, ‘played’ by a woman. She dictates the rhythm of his life in the everyday texture of his bereaved loneliness.”
But as audiences who are lucky to have already seen the new film know, Swinton might not just have two roles in the film. Guadagnino explains why he chose Swinton as the person to inhabit her multiple characters in the film. “This is a movie that is very connected to psychoanalysis,” he said, “and I like to think that only Tilda could play ego, superego and id.”
However, it’s one thing to envision Swinton as an 82-year-old psychoanalyst. It’s an entirely different story to actually bring that to life. And to help Guadagnino and the actress complete the transformation into Ebersdorf, Mark Coulier was hired. The makeup artist has already earned two Oscar wins for his work in “The Iron Lady” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” The latter of which involved heavy work with Swinton.
“Although she has a slightly androgynous look from sort of a fashion-model point of view, Tilda’s got a very feminine bone structure,” said Coulier. To help turn Swinton from a woman into an elderly man, the artist adjusted her jawline and added some thickness to her neck. All told, Swinton would sit in a chair for up to 4 hours a day for the role.
The neck and jawline wasn’t the only thing added to Swinton’s physique. The actress had some very specific, personal requests for additional makeup.
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“She did have us make a penis and balls,” Coulier said. “She had this nice, weighty set of genitalia so that she could feel it dangling between her legs, and she managed to get it out on set on a couple of occasions.” While on set, Swinton reveals that she had everyone refer to her as Lutz and many in the crew never had an inkling that it was the actress under the heavy makeup throughout the shoot.
Even though it happened, the actress reveals that she never intended on fooling anyone with the Lutz Ebersdorf reveal. Swinton said. “The genius of Marc Coulier notwithstanding, it was always our design that there would be something unresolved about the identity of the performance of Klemperer.”
So, now that the cat’s out of the bag, does Swinton regret revealing the true identity of the mysterious Lutz Ebersdorf? Kind of. “Frankly, my long-held dream was that we would never have addressed this question at all,” Swinton revealed. “My original idea was that Lutz would die during the edit, and his ‘In Memoriam’ be the final credit in the film.”
“Suspiria” hits theaters on October 26.