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It's her director Christopher Nolan's five-month-old daughter Fiona. Swank herself is cooing about co-star Al Pacino's twins with longtime girlfriend Beverly D'Angelo.
The boy and girl are 16 months old.
"Al is so proud of his little daughter because she plays the harmonica. She just took it out of his hands one day when he was playing for the twins and started blowing into it," says Swank.
She recalls that the twins were born while she and Pacino were filming Insomnia in Vancouver.
"Al would fly back to Los Angeles every Friday after we finished filming to be with Beverly and the children and then fly back to Vancouver to be on set on Mondays."
Swank, 27, insists she and husband Chad Lowe "have no immediate plans to start a family.
"I'm enjoying other people's children at the moment."
Lowe and Swank married on Sept. 28, 1997, while in their fifth year as a couple.
"Chad and I have been together 10 years. We met at a party. I'd met Leonardo DiCaprio when I did some guest spots on Growing Pains.
"We immediately became very good friends and hung out together a lot. I went to that party with Leo.
"Chad was at the party. We started talking. I was barely 18 at the time. I never thought I'd have a serious relationship so young, but it happened."
Swank had arrived in Los Angeles when she was 15. Her parents were divorced and Swank had relocated with her mother, Judy, from Bellingham.
They were so poor, she and mother lived out of the family car for several months and "shared a Denny's grand slam breakfast to start each day because that's all we could afford."
It was Hilary's stint on Growing Pains that allowed mother and daughter to get an apartment.
Growing Pains led to a short-lived series called Camp Wilder and a role in the feature film version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
When Swank got cast in The Next Karate Kid and got a role on Beverly Hills 90210, she thought she was living out her dream.
"When I was eight, I told my mom I wanted to be an actress.
"She was my greatest supporter. She helped me get involved in community theatre."
When she was nine, Hilary starred as Mowgli in a stage production of The Jungle Book and continued working in plays in Seattle.
The dream threatened to come crashing down when producer Aaron Spelling called Swank into his office after her 16th episode of Beverly Hills 90210.
"I'd signed a two-year contract with Beverly Hills 90210 because I really needed the money.
"Aaron told me he was breaking my contract because I wasn't working out on the show.
"It was in its eighth season on a real downslide and I was getting fired because the producer didn't think I was good enough.
"I honestly thought I needed to quit and find a new occupation. I broke down and cried in his office and at home."
Three weeks later, Swank got a call from independent filmmaker Kimberly Peirce asking her to audition for a little low-budget movie called Boys Don't Cry.
The salary was $75 a day, but Hilary needed the money and some serious reassurance she could act.
She won the Oscar for Boys Don't Cry, became an A-list actress and saw her salary and offers increase dramatically.
In Insomnia, which opens Friday, Swank plays a young Alaskan detective who gets to work with her idol, a homicide detective from Los Angeles played by Pacino.
"I knew instantly how my character felt being in the presence of someone like Pacino's detective. That's how I felt being in his presence.
"It's every actor's dream to work with him. He's the best there is.
"I knew that. What I didn't know was how charming and kind he is. That's the bonus."
Where Pacino was able to leave Vancouver after Insomnia wrapped, Swank stayed to film the science fiction thriller The Core, which opens this fall.
"It's one of the few times I did films back-to-back. I prefer to do one movie a year. I don't know how some actors do five pictures a year.
"I couldn't walk, let alone act, if I tried that."