The 49-year-old received her first Academy Award in 2000 for Boys Don’t Cry, a film that was based on the life of transgender man Brandon Teena, who was killed in 1993. She has also played a real-life single mother, a lawyer, and a high school dropout.
Swank finds it “so beautiful to have those conversations” with people who can identify with the parts she has portrayed, saying she never imagined her acting choices would have such an influence on others.
“It’s really special that [my filmography] features a range of ethnicities, classes, and genders of people because it allows me to establish connections with a wider range of people.
Those who struggle with addiction, those going through a sexual identity crisis, those who are confident in their sexuality but have struggled in the past, and those who were shunned in high school and dropped out because they didn’t matter—all of these people—as well as those who graduated from college and high school after seeing a film in which I starred.
