It Turns Out Tilda Swinton Really Is the Old Man in Suspiria After All

In early production days, a few pictures from the set emerged. A set of photos from March 2017 seemed to have been identified as Tilda Swinton in heavy prosthetic makeup. Many outlets identified Swinton in the photos, leaving little to no doubt that it was, indeed, her.

Nearly a year later, in February 2018, director Guadagnino finally denied the rumors in an interview with Yahoo! Movies UK. "That's a complete fake news," he said. "They made a picture of my actor Lutz Ebersdorf and they claimed it was Tilda in makeup. I don't know why and I don't know who."

In a separate (and more recent) interview with Deadline, which was published in August 2018, Guadagnino doubled down on his claims that Ebersdorf is a real person. When asked how the casting came about, he said, "We wanted to have a fresh face. Someone who was born on screen with this movie. We wanted someone who could embody the tragedy of the 20th century somehow. His character wants to try to survive but also claw back what he has lost." But isn't it peculiar that he doesn't offer any specifics as to how, exactly, they found Ebersdorf? Isn't there an intense specificity to the phrase "someone who was born on screen with this movie," as though they literally invented a person so that he could appear in the film?

Fear not, dear reader, for Lutz Ebersdorf has an IMDb page with almost nothing on it. I suppose the fact that his profile is completely empty shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. After all, Guadagnino insists he was a complete nobody prior to discovery. His page contains only one thing of note: a bio, which has been written by Ebersdorf himself. His main photo looks a little too staged, a little too "just so" to be the main photo picked by an 80-year-old German man. Shouldn't it be a poorly cropped photobooth snap from a 2006 Macbook or something along those lines?

The deeper you dig, the stranger it gets. Perhaps the only truly tangible thing one could glean from Ebersdorf's bio is "Piefke Versus," the experimental theater group he claims to have cofounded in the 1960s. There's no trace of this group anywhere on the internet, and its short art films are coincidentally "believed to be lost films."

When you good "Lutz Ebersdorf," one thing pretty exclusively pops up: a bunch of articles and photos of Tilda Swinton. Strange.

Surely, there's one way to settle this once and for all: have Lutz Ebersdorf show up on the press circuit for the film. And while Suspiria did premiere at the annual Venice Film Festival, our mysterious star was not in attendance. Swinton naturally read a note from him; he expressed sadness that he could not attend and maintained that he enjoys his privacy. "Though I strongly suspect Suspiria will be the only film I ever appear in," the note read, "I like the work."

Later, Swinton was asked by a member of the press why she elected to play two roles in the film. "What two roles?" she deadpanned, before adding, "As you will see from the credits and on all the posters, Dr. Klemperer is played by Lutz Ebersdorf, who sent a message which I read just now."

So, there you have it. We presume more evidence will trickle out as the film grows closer to release. In the meantime, we hope you'll come to your own conclusions.

Finally, in a new story from the New York Times, we got the final word on the subject. In an email, Swinton admitted that yes, that is her. The semantics of the situation were this: everyone was asking if she played the old man in Suspiria, but she maintains Lutz Ebersdorf played the character. However, Tilda confirms that she played Lutz Ebersdorf. I know, I know. But, I mean, that's the most Tilda Swinton way to say, "Yes, that's me under all those prosthetics." Now we can rest easy.

As an added bonus, I hope you take solace knowing that Tilda had fake male genitalia made for the whole affair. I'm shook.