Word of Honor

After her acclaimed debut in The Souvenir, the actor returns in its sequel, starring alongside her mother, Tilda, and playing a version of her godmother. All good material for her psychology degree, she says

- Claire Armitstead

You’re an 18-year-old school leaver, working in a florist’s and all set for a stint volunteering in Africa, when your godmother asks if you’d like to appear in a film. As its star. In 10 days’ time. For most of us, it would be the stuffof fairytales or fever dreams, but for Honor Swinton Byrne it was real. There would be no need to learn a script, she was assured, because it was all going to be improvised. All she needed to know was that she would play a film student called Julie, a lightly fictionalised version of her godmother, Joanna Hogg , who was also the film’s auteur-director.

“From what I understand, she couldn’t find Julie in these posey professional actresses who were very comfortable in front of a camera. She just said they’re all too pretty. And then she cast me. Which, you know, I took as a compliment,” says Swinton Byrne. She lets out a throaty laugh, wriggles her feet out of a pair of sparkly stilettos and snuggles herself more comfortably into a sofa at the upmarket central London hotel that is the base for her first solo publicity round, for the sequel to that first film.

The Souvenir was one of the critical hits of 2019 , which won the grand jury prize at the Sundance festival and went on to be named film of the year in a poll of 100 critics by the magazine Sight & Sound. Set in the early 1980s, it told the story of a love affair between film student Julie and a charismatic heroin addict, several years her senior, who may or may not work for the Foreign Office. By the end of the film, the mysterious Anthony, a stunning performance from Tom Burke , is dead. The Souvenir Part II picks up the story, as a heartbroken Julie struggles to get her film studies back on track while trying to piece together who Anthony really was.