Hilary Swank - Brief Article - Interview

Interview, June, 2000 by Alec Baldwin

AT HOME WITH THE HOTTEST ACTRESS OF THE MOMENT--AND HER RAINBOW TRIBE

ALEC BALDWIN: I hear you are an animal lover. HILARY SWANK: Yes. ALEC BALDWIN: So describe to me what animals were in your life when you were a child. HILARY SWANK: My childhood was lonely, and I always wanted an animal and always asked for one whenever Christmas and my birthday came around. My parents would say, "What would you like?" and I'd say, "I want a dog. I want a cat."

Then on the next Christmas or birthday, "I want a dog. I want a cat." But I never got one.

AB: You never had any animals?

HS: None, actually--until about the age of eight, when this stray cat came to my door and I took him into my bedroom. My mom finally found him in my room, and I had a huge fit, so we got to keep him.

AB: And he was your first pet? I hate that word, but[ldots]

HS: My first furry little friend, how about that? No, wait. Actually I had two gerbils named Moe and Joe. I can't believe I forgot them.

AB: We're making breakthroughs here. We're going back in time. Moe and Joe.

HS: They lived a long time in gerbil years. So I can't say I didn't get any animals.

AB: The first real pets that I got as an adult was when I was doing a play on Broadway [A Streetcar Named Desire, 1992] and living with my wife [Kim Basinger]--though we weren't married then. She said she knew I was going to be in New York because of the play and not traveling anywhere, so she came to the theater and left these two Shi Tzu puppies in my dressing room. Obviously this was some kind of a test--I think what she was really saying was, "If you raise these dogs, I'll marry you." And I had to go home every night from the theater and feed them and take them outside and walk them. Here I was playing Stanley Kowalski on Broadway and at midnight I'd be on West End Avenue walking these two little Shi Tzus.

HS: What a great story.

AB: I'm like their mother. I raised them for the first six months. When they see me, I get a different reaction than I do from the other dogs we have now.

HS: When I first moved in with my husband Chad [Lowe], I said to him, "Now that we're living together, there's one thing that you need to know: If I bring home an animal, that's just how it's going to be. There's not even going to be a discussion." And he was fine with this. About a month later, I bought an African gray parrot, which I named Seuss after Dr. Seuss, one of my favorite authors. I hand-raised him from his egg.

AB: Do you still have Seuss?

HS: Yeah! He talks a lot When Seuss wakes up it's "Good morning!" And during the day it's "Goodbye! I love you!" He rules the house. There's Lucky, my border-collie mix whom I saved from the pound. Just recently I got a cat named Deuce. And last summer when I turned twenty-five I went to visit Chad, who was working in Northern California, and went into a barn and saw a bunny sitting there and picked him up and [ldots] you know when you just have a bond with something? So when Chad asked what I wanted for my birthday, instead of this beautiful, thousand-dollar luggage set he had picked out, I was like, "No, no, I want this bunny." So he bought him. His name is Luna, and Luna is having a very happy life. And that's the story of our five animals.

AB: When did you become a vegetarian?

HS: I have always, always loved animals, but it took me all the way to age fourteen to realize I was eating them. It's been eleven years since I stopped eating meat--red meat, white meat, or fish.

AB: Fish I've given up slowly [ldots] like the road has gotten narrower and narrower for me. I asked a producer who had worked with Jacques Cousteau if Cousteau ate fish. The guy smiled and said Cousteau's rule was "None caught within the hundred-mile limit of the U.S."

HS: I think I became a little anemic when I first stopped eating meat, so I had to find a way to get protein. And I was born in Nebraska and lived in Iowa. We grew up on that stuff.

AB: I've found that the doorway to animal rights and animal protection leads to a lot of other things. For instance, there's been this enormous lobster die-off here on Long Island recently. Last summer the City of New York sprayed malathion all over to wipe out mosquitoes, and right after they finished there were huge storms and the pesticide ran off into the water. Now a prominent toxicologist is saying there are two residual chemicals in the bodies of these lobsters that are trace elements of one thing and one thing only: malathion.

HS: And then we go and eat that stuff. We're just putting it right back into our bodies.

AB: Let's talk for a moment about the lifestyle of someone who does what you do. Now that you've won an Oscar, is there a game that has to be played, and how do you feel about that?

HS: I feel a responsibility to live my life in a way that is respectful of people and nature. There's no handbook that says what to do when you're the girl or the guy of the moment. I'm at a place where I'm realizing, especially with Boys Don't Cry, that when I go out and do press, I'm not just doing press about a movie, I'm doing press about a very important story.