Hilary Swank knows her role

October 12, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Actress again plays a determined woman from modest means in ‘Conviction.’

By Amy Kaufman

Los Angeles Times

SANTA MONICA, Calif.

Growing up in a mo- bile home in the Pacific Northwest, Hilary Swank unwittingly found herself placed in her first role: trailer trash.

“My friends’ parents didn’t want me playing with their kids, and I didn’t understand it, because I didn’t think of where I lived as being that big of a deal. I had a roof over my head,” Swank said recently as she bit into a cucumber finger sandwich at Santa Monica’s Tudor House tea room, a world away from her modest childhood home. “But their parents would say, ‘You need to go home now.’ At 7 years old, I learned what classism was, growing up poor.”

These days, the Poor Girl has become strongly identified with another character type close to her life story: the Bold, Resilient Woman. It’s little wonder, considering Swank won two Academy Awards for portraying such characters — first as a girl struggling with a gender identity crisis in 1999’s “Boys Don’t Cry,” and five years later as a boxer in “Million Dollar Baby.”

Her latest film, “Conviction,” out Friday, is no exception. She plays Betty Anne Waters, a real-life single mother who put herself through law school in an effort to free her brother from prison because she believed he was wrongly convicted of murder.

But instead of rebelling against or despairing over what some might see as pigeonholing, Swank, 36, seems at peace with it. She doesn’t care if she’s typecast, she says, because she likes drama.

“Dramatic, yeah. That’s how people probably think of me,” she said. “The hardest thing for an actor is to break out of what they do. I want to do it all — but at the core of my passion is drama. And I definitely get sent more dramas than anything else. But that doesn’t worry me at all, because dramas move me. They inspire me. They broaden my world more than an action film or a scary film or a comedy.”

Swank’s strong dramatic bones seem to show through even when she does attempt something less serious — such as the 2007 romance “P.S. I Love You.” Early in the story, her character’s fianc dies from a brain tumor.

“I thought I was doing something light, but I ended up crying every day of that movie,” she said, laughing.

Still, repeatedly taking on sober fare can be taxing, Swank admits. She first read the “Conviction” script after completing “Million Dollar Baby” but decided she wasn’t ready for it. “I had done so many real-life characters back-to-back, and I just needed to breathe for a moment,” she said.

“I play a lot of these true-life stories, one, because there’s not a lot of original, unique fictional stories,” she said. “If there are, they’re usually written for males.”

“Conviction,” set in Massachusetts, centers on the bond between Waters and her brother, Kenny (played by Sam Rockwell), who remained close even after they were sent to separate foster homes as children. When a diner waitress was found stabbed to death in her trailer home in 1980, Kenny — known as a local troublemaker — was charged with murder, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Waters, believing he was innocent, devoted the next 18 years to freeing him.

Tony Goldwyn, the director of the film, spent years trying to attain the rights to the story after learning about Waters on a TV newsmagazine. He and screenwriter Pamela Gray repeatedly visited Waters to interview her, and they dug up court transcripts to piece together the script.

That strength of that story is what ultimately persuaded Swank to sign on to the film, Goldwyn said — plus, she had come to accept that this was the kind of part she played best.

“She said to me, ‘I have realized that I was put on the planet to play certain kind of characters, and this is one of them. This is what I was meant to do. It’s to bring to life people like Betty Anne Waters,’” he recalled.