Hilary Swank on returning home as an Oscar winner: ‘I can take the high road on a lot of things, but not that’
It was the year 2000, and Hilary Swank was in a peculiar position. She had won her first Academy Award, for Boys Don’t Cry, having grasped the coveted statuette on stage in front of an audience that included Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton, and Morgan Freeman. She was, by all accounts, a star – one that came crashing down to earth when she later went to pick up some medication only to be told: sorry, you don’t have health insurance.
The idea of an Oscar winner with no health insurance sounds ludicrous, I tell Swank over Zoom. The actor, now 49, nods emphatically. “It seems so obvious, right? I’m winning an Academy Award, I’m super famous, it’s all glamorous...” she says. “But I made $3,000 the year I did Boys Don’t Cry, and you had to make $5,000 in order to qualify for health insurance.” Her facialist, too, assumed life had changed overnight. “The next time I saw her, she asked if I had come in a limo! It’s a great reminder that you can’t judge a book by its cover.”
This is a mantra Swank lives by. She made. And there in her eyes is Maggie, the Missouri waitress-turned-boxer of – for which Swank won her second Oscar. (By then, thankfully, she had health insurance.)
