Tilda Swinton would prefer to keep her mask off. While appearing at the SXSW festival this week, the Oscar winner shared that she’s over COVID protocols on film sets, according to Variety: “I’m about to shoot a picture in Ireland, and I was told to wear a mask at all times, and I’m not.” 

Swinton was delivering a keynote address at the festival when she reportedly revealed that she’s no longer overly concerned with mask-wearing. “I’m sure this is being recorded,” said Swinton, per Variety, before maintaining that while she’s had COVID multiple times, she is “very healthy.” 

“I’m not wearing a mask because I’m super healthy and I’ve had COVID so many times and I’m so full of antibodies…and I have faith,” she said.

It seems Swinton’s attitude about the virus has shifted since her interview with The Guardian last year, where she revealed that she’s experienced symptoms associated with long COVID, including brain fog. “I was coughing like an old gentleman who smoked a pipe for 70 years, and had nasty vertigo,” said Swinton. “I got off relatively lightly, but the worst thing is how it affected my brain.”

Swinton went on to describe how her symptoms made it more difficult for her to learn lines. “I did two films that I had to learn a lot of text for. One was the Wes Anderson, and he likes you to speak like a speeding train,” she said. “I’m normally quite quick at studying, and picking stuff up, but this was like chewing a really big piece of gum. I couldn’t remember my lines.” 

While Swinton told The Guardian she was “more or less” recovered, she also admitted that she’s “still forgetting things. I have to work my brain.”

Beyond giving the keynote address, Swinton was at SXSW to promote her latest film, A24’s Problemista—produced by Emma Stone and directed by Los Espookys’ Julio Torres and starring Swinton, Torres, Isabella Rossellini, and Greta Lee. It’s unclear whether Swinton wore a mask on set while shooting the film, which follows Torres, an aspiring toy designer from El Salvador who winds up assisting an erratic art world outcast played by Swinton. Either way, she seems to have had a wonderful time shooting the project. “I love him. I always loved him,” said Swinton of Torres at SXSW, according to Variety. “It’s such a thrill to call him comrade. He’s next level. Now he’s a filmmaker, and that’s really good for all of us who are interested in film.”

While she’s a big fan of Torres, Swinton seems less enamored with other artists of his generation. “There is a belief that when you make a film, or write a story, that all the focus is on you as an individual. The spotlight is on you,” she said, according to Variety. “One thing that I can attest to, that I am actually a real poster child of, is staying collective. You don’t have to get separated from your kin and your herd.”

Despite being quite a unique performer herself, Swinton seems wary of this thrust toward individualism, reportedly describing it as a “new virus” that tends to infect younger people. Her cohort, says Swinton, has “more respect for and investment in collective action. But now I do feel that there is pressure on fine artists to cut ties, grow big balls and be a narcissist. And that might put a lot of people off.”