10 Actors Who Refused To Play Themselves On Screen

Tilda Swinton is an actress who lives and dies by transformation: no two of her characters ever really look the same, and she clearly relishes the opportunity acting affords her to slink into somebody else's skin.

Swinton took this to unprecedented extremes in Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria remake, where in addition to playing the recognisably Swinton-esque choreographer Madame Blanc, she also appeared prominently as a male psychotherapist, Dr. Josef Klemperer.

Swinton went under extensive makeup to become the elderly Klemperer, which proved convincing enough that even some of her castmates didn't know it was her at first.

But Swinton, who has a history of playing androgynous, off-kilter characters, ultimately wanted to take the transformation a step further for no sake but her own. And so, she asked the makeup department to build her a prosthetic penis, which she wore while shooting as the character.

Whether you knew Klemperer was Swinton or not, the actress evidently wanted to fully submit to the transformation rather than being "Tilda Swinton dressing up as an old man."

Hell, she even wrote the IMDB profile for Lutz Ebersdorf, the fictional actor who was supposedly playing Klemperer, and refused to admit she played the part until Suspiria had completed its run on the festival circuit. Now that's commitment.