Tilda Swinton knows how to get lucky.
“Well, I was a professional gambler,” the “Snowpiercer” actress revealed in the December issue of GQ. “When I lived in London, there were a couple of years when I didn’t really earn money doing anything else. I mean, I did other things, like I made work, and I was working with [writer-director] Derek Jarman at the time, but the way I made money was putting money on horses.”
The 54-year-old says her grandfather’s gardener, Bert Matheson, taught her how to bet. Those skills came in handy, considering the winnings from one bet on one horse “kept us for nearly a year.”
“He taught me how to pick winners, and it kind of works,” Swinton told the magazine, which named her Woman of the Year. “It’s very strange. I mean, it doesn’t always work, of course. It’s got something to do with the form, and there’s a certain amount of knowledge about particular horses, but it really is not that. It’s to do with, um, just looking at the horses in the ring and asking whether they’re gonna win or not! Basically, I mean.”
Swinton returns to the big screen in 2015 with Judd Apatow‘s “Trainwreck” and “A Bigger Splash,” starring alongside Dakota Johnson.