Here’s how to watch David Bowie and Tilda Swinton play a couple in the music video for “The Stars (Are Out Tonight).” Oscar-winning British actress Tilda Swinton has been compared visually to music legend David Bowie throughout her career. The pair are both famous for their androgynous, otherworldly aesthetic and Swinton’s name frequently comes up whenever there’s talk of making a David Bowie biopic. There’s even a Tumblr blog titled Tilda Stardust dedicated to the theory that Swinton and Bowie are actually the same person.
To Swinton, the comparisons are a massive compliment. The actress has been a fan of Bowie since she was a teenager and bought a copy of his 1973 album Aladdin Sane which was the first record she ever owned. The script for Nicholas Roeg’s 1976 sci-fi film The Man Who Fell To Earth – which starred Bowie as an alien visiting Earth to save his doomed home planet – was also the first screenplay Swinton ever read and she’s confessed to feeling a connection to the movie ever since.
Naturally, Tilda Swinton jumped at playing a role alongside David Bowie when he asked her to appear in the music video for the song “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” taken from his 2013 album The Next Day. The video sees Bowie and Swinton play the part of a married couple living in Californian suburbia whose domestic bliss is disrupted by the arrival of a pair of rock ‘n’ roll starlets - played by models Andreja Pejić and Saskia de Brauw - who appear to be younger versions of themselves. Iselin Steiro also appears as another younger version of Bowie.
https://www.anrdoezrs.net/links/100764923/type/dlg/sid/UUsrUeUpU324508/https://vimeo.com/61305172
The video for “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” is directed by Italian-Canadian filmmaker Floria Sigismondi who helmed punk-rock biopic The Runaways and also worked with singer David Bowie on the videos for his songs “Little Wonder”, “Dead Man Walking” and “The Next Day.” If the video’s cinematography seems vaguely familiar, that’s because it was shot by Jeff Cronenweth who worked as director of photography on several David Fincher films, including Fight Club.
“The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” music video may have proved Tumblr’s Tilda Stardust theory wrong, but it did spark a close friendship between Swinton and Bowie for the remainder of his life. Swinton went on to play a rock star partly inspired by Bowie in Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash and paid several touching tributes to the music legend after his death in 2016. Now that a sequel to the Bowie-fronted fantasy film Labyrinth is finally moving ahead, fans of the Thin White Duke are hoping Swinton might appear in another Bowie-adjacent project by reprising his iconic role as Jareth the Goblin King.