From the Archives: Hilary Swank

"People, I think, are really hooked up on the outward appearances and what's right and what's wrong. If anything, I've kind of evolved, I've lived through an array of different emotions. But now I feel really inspired to live my dream fully, to live in each moment, to really see people for what they really are - not whatever's outward but trying to see what they're really saying when they talk." - Hilary Swank

Nothing actress Hilary Swank has done previously could possibly prepare one for the astonishing work she does in Kimberly Peirce's Boys Don't Cry, an evocative, unsensationalistic treatment of the Brandon Teena story. As Brandon Teena, Swank must convince audiences that she is portraying a young woman passing as a young male. From Teena Brandon's innocent rebirth as Brandon Teena to the harrowing end, Swank rivets with her total inhabitation of the role.

The twenty-five year old actress began her career nine years ago, appearing in films like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Next Karate Kid and on the television teen soap Beverly Hills, 90210, where she had a seasonlong stint as a single mother. But her performance in Boys Don't Cry, which is gathering Oscar buzz, could cause the industry to reshift its perspective of her career. Even Swank senses she's on the threshold.

"I read all those scripts that go out, I read all the amazing movies that you see but I don't get a chance to do them," Swank says. "It's a catch-22 in this business: to get a great movie, you have to be in a great movie. So here I was afforded this amazing opportunity. . .to stretch myself as an artist. It's really exciting when you do a piece of work that you really believe in and people respond to it like that and respond to your craft."

And the lengths Swank had to go to in order to do Brandon Teena justice. She cut off her long locks (she still sports a soft crop), lost weight and worked out to bulk up. Swank flattened her breasts and stuffed her pants and ventured out in the streets to gauge people's reactions. The results of her experiment provided Swank with further emotional insight into Brandon's situation. "If you didn't fit into a black and white definition of boy or girl, you slip between the cracks. It's a lonely place. People don't want to have anything to do with you. It put me in a state of hopelessness. I was the same exact person inside. . .yet I was treated so different. I wasn't respected and I was ignored and people were threatened by me."

Her psyche took further battering once filming began. Her graphic but sensual love scenes with costar Chloe Sevigny, who plays Brandon's girlfriend, gave way to scenes where Brandon is stripped down and brutally raped by Brandon's eventual killers, portrayed by Peter Sarsgaard and Brendan Sexton III. Swank was so deeply invested in her character that she had great difficulty shedding her character's skin.

"I was definitely ready to be myself again," she admits. "Always trying to be something else is exhausting. Different voice, different mannerisms - I stifled everything about Hilary and all my femininity, and I felt by the third week of filming - we had two weeks left - that I'd lost every ounce of my femininity and I thought I was never going to find Hilary again. I was totally lost."

Her husband, actor Chad Lowe, provided the way back. "He was the only thing that got me through it," Swank says. "He's an actor so he understood. He was really my only anchor back to me because he could see past outward appearance or whatever it looked like I'd become. So I would have to say he was my saving grace." The two have been married for two of the seven years they've been together.

Brandon's ghost is still very much with Swank and becoming Brandon has given her more purpose professionally and personally. "A lot of people would see [Brandon] as a victim. To me, what I saw and what inspired me - this was a person who lived their dream. Even though she was killed at 21, she probably had a fuller life than most people who live to 50 because she lived every moment the way she wanted to live it. She didn't conform. That, to me, is my inspiration. I hope that I can give to this world and be who I want to be, be myself and not conform. That, to me, is the biggest message. How can you not watch that and be inspired and filled with joy?"