The greatest villain in Narnia is Jadis, the seemingly invincible White Witch who has cursed the one-time paradise to endure an eternal winter. To play the nefarious and chilly role, the filmmakers embraced executive producer Perry Moores suggestion of veteran Scottish actress Tilda Swinton, one of the mainstays of European cinema. "I've been a fan of Tilda since I saw her in Orlando," Adamson says of his leading lady, whose pale complexion and ethereal beauty added dramatic dimension to the imposing creature she plays in the film. "In addition to her physical stature, which suits the character perfectly, she brings a strength, intensity and intelligence, all characteristics I wanted for the White Witch. After all, she has to be as smart, as strong and as intense as Aslan the Lion in her confrontations with him."
He continues: "I think the guiding principle for both of us was avoiding cliché. When C.S. Lewis wrote this book, the character of the White Witch was somewhat original but that was 55 years ago. Now we have seen so many evil queens and witches, from Cruella De Ville onwards. So we wanted to stay away from cartoonish, cackling figures. Instead, what we wanted was a more human type of evil, something a little darker and more real, and I knew Tilda had the sophistication to pull that off. It was a big challenge. Ultimately, Tilda created a really convincing witch who evokes pure icy coldness."
Unlike most of her cast-mates, Swinton came to the story completely fresh. "I'm one of the few people who was brought up in the UK who didn't read any of the Narnia books as a child," Swinton confesses. "So, I came to them entirely because of Andrew Adamson who asked me to be in this film. I then read the stories to my six-year-old children. They were the acid test. When they thought it was a good idea, I began to take the idea of the film seriously. Of course, it's a tall order to play the epitome of all evil. I just might have children backing away from me for the rest of my life!"
It was also a tall order for an actress used to portraying the finer nuances of human emotion to take on a character for which emotion is a foreign concept. "Jadis is not human, you have to remember. She has no feelings about anything," Swinton notes. "She's not really comprehensible on any normal level. She has created Narnia as a reflection of her own state of mind, freezing it into perpetual winter; no spring, no Christmas, no progress, no good, a pretty joyless place, until these children begin to turn it around."
Tilda Swinton is a Scottish (and Cambridge-educated) actress who began making films with the English director Derek Jarman in 1985 with Caravaggio. She went on to work with him for eight years and seven more films before his death in 1994, including The Last of England, The Garden, War Requiem and Wittgenstein. In 1990, Swinton won the Coppa Volpe at the Venice Film Festival for her performance in Jarmans film adaptation of Marlowes Edward II. Two years later, she came to wider international recognition and critical acclaim with her extraordinary portrayal of the androgynous and eternal Orlando, directed by Sally Potter.
Since then, Swinton's work has included two films with Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Conceiving Ada and Teknolust, Susan Streitfelds Female Perversions, Tim Roths The War Zone and Robert Lepages Possible Worlds. In 2000, she starred in The Deep End for directors David Siegel and Scott McGeehee, again winning numerous international awards, including a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress. Recently, she co-starred in Spike Jonzes Adaptation, David Mackenzies acclaimed Bete noire Young Adam and Thumbsucker, directed by Mike Mills, to be released in 2005. She reunited with Keanu Reeves in Constantine and co-starred with Bill Murray in Jim Jarmuschs acclaimed drama, Broken Flowers.