Hilary Swank first won fame and acclaim for her groundbreaking performance in 1999's Boys
Don't Cry.
As if that wasn't impressive enough, she did it all over again five years later when she
won a second Oscar for Clint Eastwood's boxing drama Million Dollar Baby.
And then, all of a sudden, Hollywood stopped talking about her.
In March 2018, she reminded the world that she'd stepped away from the screen scene to
help her father recover from a major operation.
"For those of you that don't know, my dad got a lung transplant."
"And yeah I took three years off to help him through that life journey."
But her hiatus seemed to last longer than that, as she dropped from household name status
to barely there over the last decade.
From a series of low-performing projects, to her pivot to personal and professional
pursuits outside of Tinseltown, to a bizarre political scandal, Hilary Swank gave studios
more than enough reason to look elsewhere during casting.
But can she make a comeback now?
Too much, too soon
They say that winning an Oscar can be a curse.
But winning two in the span of five years?
That's double trouble.
Swank faced considerable backlash in Hollywood after she won her second Best Actress Oscar
in 2005.
"I'm just a girl from a trailer park who had a dream."
By then, there was a growing feeling that Swank had been excessively rewarded for her
talents, at the expense of others.
Suddenly, the actress had gone from starring in 90210 to boasting the rare honor of two
Academy Awards on her shelf, while edging out the likes of Kate Winslet and Annette
Bening.
But beyond the politics of who deserved what, Swank was inevitably set up for failure by
the Academy's lavishing so much praise on her.
By age 30, she had far exceeded expectations, and accomplished more than most actors could
ever dream of.
At that point, there was really no place to go but down -- especially since films like
Boys Don't Cry and Million Dollar Baby weren't easy to come by, even for an actress of her
caliber.
Swank tried to reclaim that momentum with dramatic turns in films like Freedom Writers
and Conviction, but critics were only mildly impressed and audiences just weren't interested.
As a result, Swank became a difficult actress to place in Hollywood.
She was great in those lightning-in-a-bottle leading roles, but if the films were too high
brow, fans failed to turn up.
If they were too low-key, though, they threatened to mar her hard-won reputation as a prestige
actor.
Her subsequent choices were key, and yet ...
Crash and burn
After she won her first Oscar for Boys Don't Cry, Hilary Swank made some confusing movie
choices.
On the one hand, she starred in Christopher Nolan's well-regarded psychological drama
Insomnia alongside Al Pacino in his prime.
On the other, she also hopped right into the cheesy disaster movie genre with The Core,
which was a massive flop and did her highlights reel exactly zero favors.
And the same thing happened to her again after finding second success in Million Dollar Baby.
She shifted wildly between starring in prestige movies that were too mediocre for Oscar consideration
and mainstream flicks that seemed more geared towards making money than satisfying audiences.
One of her roughest patches came in 2009, when she starred in the Amelia Earhart bio-pic
Amelia, which was in every sense a disaster.
Reviews were terrible, and box office returns were even worse.
Swank's days of Oscar glory started to feel like a thing of the past even then, and her
most memorable role from the era ended up being a pretty generic romantic comedy called
P.S.
I Love You.
For her part, Swank has taken the hits and misses in stride, telling The Independent
in 2014:
"You're an artist and you're putting yourself out there, and you take that leap, and sometimes
you fly and sometimes you fall."
Of course, it wasn't just her flailing filmography that caused the actress problems.
An international incident
In 2011, Hilary Swank traveled to Chechnya to attend controversial leader Ramzan Kadyrov's
birthday celebration.
In a strange address to the crowd, Swank lavished praise on the capital city of Grozny and thanked
Kadyrov for the invitation, saying:
"I hope someday, when you get your opera house built, maybe I'll have a film premiere here."
Aside from being generally bizarre, the visit was also problematic for the actress.
Swank had positioned herself as a strong advocate of social issues in many of her films, but
Kadyrov had a record of alleged human rights violations, which prompted considerable backlash
from the film community.
Swank ended up firing her manager and agents and was reportedly even dropped by her PR
firm.
She released a statement which read:
"I deeply regret attending this event.
If I had a full understanding of what this event was apparently intended to be, I would
never have gone."
Perhaps not coincidentally, Swank saw a two-year gap in between projects around this time,
but she's since devoted her downtime to visiting orphanages in India and helping to set up
schools in Ethiopia.
She also launched her own charity called Hilaroo, which helps connect children with support
animals to encouraging healing for both.
That's a lot of clean up work.
Outside work
Swank's absence from the spotlight has also had to do with things beyond her own control.
In 2015, the actress revealed that she had recently put her career on the back burner
in order to take care of her ailing father, who had just had a lung transplant.
During Swank's self-imposed hiatus to care for her father, however, she did begin to
pursue another passion: fashion.
In 2016, she launched Mission Statement, a high end clothing line described as "aesthetic
wear."
The brand is a hybrid of high fashion and workout clothes, including everything from
$900 leather pants to $145 sports bras.
Speaking with Forbes about her foray into entrepreneurism, Swank said:
"I feel it parallels making movies in that you start with an idea and have to find the
right artisans to collaborate with bringing that vision to the world."
She also made it clear that while she intends to manage the clothing company, acting is
still a priority, adding:
"With a full-time acting career (of which I'm still so passionate) and getting a new
company off the ground (of which I maintain creative and managerial leadership) this can
sometimes be a challenge [...] The guiding light for me is that I'm passionate about
both of them (and want to excel in both of them) so I somehow manage to find sufficient
time every day.
I also have incredible support and teams in both worlds — without which I would not
be successful."
While it's easy to highlight actresses whose Hollywood careers have taken a backseat to
their entrepreneurial efforts — Gwyneth Paltrow, Jessica Alba, and Kate Hudson, just
to name a few — it's a lot harder to find ones who've successfully managed both.
But Swank has given us plenty of reason lately to believe she's not done entertaining the
masses just yet.
Not only does she star in the 2018 Sundance debut What They Had but she's also trying
on a new medium for size.
Turning to TV
Like more and more big screen stars are doing these days, Swank attempted a pivot to television.
In 2014, she was cast in the Starz drama The One Percent, a highly buzzed project from
acclaimed Birdman director, Alejandro Iñárritu.
However, the show has since found itself in development limbo, so Swank returned to the
film scene with a very small part in the well-received Steven Soderbergh film Logan Lucky.
But Swank hasn't given up on the idea of being a part of the peak TV era just yet.
In fact, she appears in the new FX limited series, Trust, which was helmed Oscar-winning
director, Danny Boyle and centers on the story of oil heir John Paul Getty III.
The small screen experience has been revelatory for Swank, as she told Variety in January
2018:
"The beauty of television is everything gets revealed as you go.
There's such beauty in that it is so human.
It's so hard to tell a story in two hours.
I'm coming to recognize that."
In other words, even though she made a name for herself in the movie business, she, like
many others in the industry now, is finding out that the television arena gives actors
a lot more room to stretch their legs.
"It's incredible what you -- when you put your mind to something, you know, when you
recognize what you're capable of, it's incredible -- if you get out of your own way."
If she's half as good on this new series as she was in her finest film moments, well,
we might be seeing her take over an entirely different awards season circuit in the very
near future.
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