Most actors will tell you the greatest challenge—and a whole lot more fun—is to play a villain. But when it came to portraying a larger-than-life woman in the real world like Betty Anne Waters in Conviction, Hilary Swank could not have been more inspired. A single mom and high school dropout who spent an enormous part of her life struggling all the way through law school and then the convoluted U.S. court system to free her wrongly convicted brother, her plight and her ultimate triumph is, according to Swank during this conversation, what validates her in turn both has an actress and a human being.
Q: What was it about Betty Anne Waters that moved you to become her in Conviction?
HILARY SWANK: For me, it was such a beautiful love story between a brother and a sister. It was so compelling. I don’t actually remember seeing a love story this beautiful; I can’t even remember when. So for me, someone so selfless like Betty Anne is my real life hero, you know, for being so selfless and having such a big heart for another human being. It was an honor. I feel really grateful for the opportunity to be a part of her collaboration on this the story.
Q: How did your bond with Betty Anne develop?
HS: I had the blessing of being able to meet Betty Anne, but I didn’t want to meet her right away because there’s something as actors that we do while we’re hanging out. We do imitations of people in general anyway.—it’s part of what we do—and I didn’t want to be mimicking someone. I wanted to get the physicality of this person and I wanted to understand the heart of this person and what about Betty Anne made her have this drive and determination to go against such odds. So for eight weeks, I had audio tapes of Betty Anne speaking from when Tony Goldwyn went to talk to her, and I just listened to these audio tapes every day and looked for the emotion between the lines of what she was saying; what moved her and what angered her. That was wonderful, to be able to have that amount of time, and then Sam [Rockwell] came on board. He had a crash course of getting into character because he came on board four weeks before we started filming. Sam said, “I want to meet Betty Anne and the family right away!” And I said, “I’m coming with you, because this is a great opportunity for us to bond in this experience.” So we went to Bristol, R.I where Betty Anne lives now, and spent the weekend with [her] and her family. Then obviously, there was the accent. I’m not very good at getting an accent right away; it takes me a long time. Especially this Massachusetts accent!
