Tilda Swinton has an other-worldly cover feature for New York Magazine. I don’t know how to even describe it. It’s not like any other celebrity interview or profile I’ve ever read. It’s not even the traditionally “bizarre” kind of interview that Tilda usually gives. It’s best just to read the whole thing (go here for that), but I’ve made a handy list of highlights and details that I enjoyed:

*Tilda Swinton’s boyfriend/lover Sandro Kopp acts as her protector sometimes. Sandro shows the reporter photos of his and Tilda’s shared dogs. Sandro asks the reporter to “not be mean to my baby.”

*Tilda likes to hold hands with friends and loved ones.

*The deal with Sandro her lover and the father of her children: Kopp, an artist who, among other things, paints his friends’ portraits via Skype, is also the center of the titillating and well-circulated part of her legend: that somehow she lives up in the highlands of Scotland in a thruple with two obedient men. Those men are Kopp, and her ex-partner, the artist and writer John Byrne, 20 years her senior, with whom she has twins, Honor and Xavier (who are now 16 years old). All of this came into tabloid focus in 2008, when ­Swinton became mainstream famous by winning an Oscar for Michael Clayton, and her sensible arrangement—Swinton explained that she and Byrne hadn’t been “sweethearts” for some time, and he wasn’t interested in traveling with her or taking the kids snorkeling, and in any case they were all good friends, and he had taken up with his own sweetheart nearby—seemed like something only a man could get away with, and therefore all the more legendary. Of course, if she were a man, it would hardly have been worthy of much attention.

*She organizes annual vacations with random friends that include Michael Stipe and Buzz Aldrin.

*Karl Lagerfeld on Tilda: “People think she’s like a chic fashion victim… but she’s the most down-to-earth ­person you will ever meet.”

*When she cancels meetings, she sends emails detailing her symptoms, like: “I am in a battle with a mega sore throat plus other grisly mucus-based symptoms.”

*She was a Communist at Cambridge: She fell under the spell of what she describes as “a kind of high church of ­fellow traveler,” this old set of 1930s Communists like Margot Heinemann and Raymond Williams: “They were my teachers; they built everything which my generation could aspire to in terms of fairness and kindness and a kind of good path for humane living,” she says.

*Her MoMA “sleeping in a box” performance art piece last year was about grief – she was mourning her mother.

*She doesn’t care for London: “My connection with London was very fleeting. I lived there for 13 years, and it might as well have been a weekend. I spent most of the time with nocturnal people.” Besides: “My family comes from the south of Edinburgh, and I would always see the signs saying: TO INVERNESS AND THE NORTH. And I just always wanted to go to Inverness and the North.”

*She emailed to NY Mag reporter about her character in Only Lovers Left Alive and how it’s about Nature and Friendship and “the slow burn” of fellow travelers.

[From Vulture]

She’s exquisite isn’t she? I wish I could watch Tilda and Sandro interact for like 10 minutes. I’m not even saying I would want to watch their p0rn or anything, I just would love to watch them talk to each other. Anyway, I like that Tilda is basically a real, authentic Artist who genuinely thinks about Art without having to be all James Franco about it.

Photos courtesy of Norman Jean Roy/NY Magazine.