Just one-and-a-half rounds of Aperol Spritzes in with Sienna Miller, she asks to see my Tinder account, telling me she’s a go-to for friends who need help tweaking their dating profiles.
Several seconds of frowning concentration later, she declares with a smirk: ‘I’m going to set you up with your boyfriend.’
It’s unusual for a celebrity to make an interviewer feel so at ease, but Sienna Miller has that knack. Still, this relaxed confidence hasn’t come easily. After a choppy ride into tabloid celebrity 15 years ago as the It girl with famous boyfriends and boho belts, Miller has only recently found an equilibrium after the whiplash of too much notoriety.
‘There are always good and bad elements to fame,’ she explains, nervously balling up little pieces of paper as we talk, rolling them like bowling balls along the table at Cafe Cluny in New York. ‘It would be ridiculous to say that it’s not beneficial… It was extremely fun and exciting.
'I’ve met Keith Richards and Mick Jagger! I’ve had experiences I couldn’t dream of,’ she says. ‘But the experience that I had with it? It’s not worth it for me. It was way too intense.’
Now, Miller has what could be called a healthy amount of celebrity–enough that she can get backstage at a Taylor Swift concert so her daughter – seven-year-old Marlowe – can meet her idol, but not so much to be a front-page splash any longer.
‘[Marlowe] says I’m not famous enough sometimes,’ she chuckles. ‘Her idea of fame is, like, Ariana Grande.’
Miller is currently preparing for the release of American Woman, a $5 million independent film that will almost certainly not attract her as many eyeballs as an Ariana Grande Instagram post, perhaps, but will convince anyone who watches it that she’s the real deal. Her character, Deb, a blue collar Pennsylvania waitress who picks up the pieces of her life after her child goes missing, has a life so unlike her own that she can disintegrate her own image behind a role.
‘I don’t want to be myself in a film– ever,’ she says, her crystal blue eyes locked into focus. ‘The job of acting really is metamorphosis. If you’re doing it right, you should disappear.’
Yet something inherently remains of Miller in Deb, and as she explains how the character transforms from a slightly irresponsible young woman to a resolute force of strength for her family, a parallel between reality and fiction becomes clear.
As I learn over the course of our interview, Miller is in the midst of her own quiet revolution, from a fashion plate in her twenties known for her wild private life to a 37-year-old mother and formidable actor.
‘It was the opportunity to play somebody who earns respect throughout a film. Ending as a different woman from how she began,’ she says of Deb, but perhaps also herself. ‘It feels like an odyssey.’
This is essentially the first movie Miller has carried fully on her back.
‘I’d never been in every scene of a film,’ she says. ‘I have a sense of what I’m capable of for the first time.’ She’s delivered small but impressive performances in some not-so-impressive movies, like her first major film, Alfie, a fairly mediocre Hollywood remake in which she brings heart to a movie fuelled by caddish machismo.
When she has had the rare larger role, like in 2006’s Factory Girl, an Edie Sedgwick biopic that co-stars Guy Pearce, she has shined. And there have been more recent strong supporting roles in Oscar-winning Foxcatcher and American Sniper.
Still, it’s usually been her image, not her acting, that’s attracted the attention. And it has been ever thus… Miller’s outsized infamy overshadowing her work. Which is a shame when you realise just how good she is.
When I tell her that, she responds as if she’s heard it before. ‘I was seen as someone’s girlfriend, then someone fashionable, and you can’t be that and be good at acting,’ she says. ‘I was really proud of some of the early work–it just felt like I was constantly having to go through hurdles to prove I was serious.’
Of course, Miller can never fully vanish into a character–though she tells me that, even at the height of her fame, she was very insecure – the objective truth is that she’s too striking not to stand out. It’s the age-old Thomas Hardy tale of beauty sometimes being a curse. She jokes that I’m lucky to be a man because of how much less pressure there is around aging, but she’s seasoned enough to understand her natural beauty is now accompanied by the wisdom and distance that age afford you.
Today, Miller has an extra glow to her wheaty hair and is freckle dappled, having just returned from a recent vacation in Tuscany, making her look – from certain angles at least – like a young Stevie Nicks or Cheryl Tiegs. She now lives in New York’sWest Village, not far from where we’re talking, in a three-floor apartment, though she has her sights set on moving to Brooklyn to get more space for her family.
Her life is fairly mundane most of the time, she explains. Marlowe wakes her up with a prod in the eye at the crack of dawn.Then she lets out the dog, Tennessee, feeds Eve the cat, has a bowl of cereal with Marlowe, makes pancakes or eggs before the walk to school at 8.15am, and pick up at 2.45pm.
And that’s pretty much it, she explains, when she’s not on set, an average day in the life of a New York City mum.
While she’s not with Marlowe’s father, actor Tom Sturridge, they have a mature take on co-parenting; he even spends the night. ‘He’s at the house and he’s going to stay there tonight,’ she says. ‘It’s not like there’s a structure for custody. We make it work. It’s not conventional.’ After they split, she was alone for about nine months.
‘It was about the first time in my life I’d ever been single. It was fine. I really like my own company. I quite like being independent,’ she says with a little laugh. ‘But the dating thing, which I tried a couple of times? That I don’t envy. I went on a couple of dates with people that I was set up with and… y’know…’
One person eventually clicked and, for about a year, she has been with Lucas Zwirner, son of super-gallerist David Zwirner, who she met when he was ushering her around a Diane Arbus photography show. ‘He’s not an actor! He’s not famous!’ she says proudly of their relationship. He is the one thing she is tight-lipped about, even referring to him as ‘he who shall not be named’, a savvy move after years of the spotlight shining on her romantic life.
While the paparazzi do still snap her, it’s not as crazy as it once was. And she’s got a more relaxed perspective around it. ‘I’ll be walking my child to school and they’ll take photos, which is enraging. [But] they’re quite… I don’t want to say respectful, because I find it an incredibly disrespectful profession, but they’re not in our faces,’ she says. ‘I just try to ignore it.’ Though Marlowe does get a bit freaked by the cameras, she’s also impressed by the right amount of attention.
‘She’s proud if we’re walking down the street and someone says something nice,’ she beams. ‘She’s like, “Yeah, go Mum!”’
If this all sounds like the rosiest symmetry to life, it was never a guarantee. It was always her goal to be a serious actress.
Growing up between London and Wiltshire with a yoga teacher mum, an art dealer dad, and Kelly Hoppen for a stepmother, by the time she hit boarding school in Berkshire, she yearned, not for fame, but for a creative existence. ‘I was naughty and arty and funny. I wore two different trainers–I bought a patent red pair and a lime green pair and I’d wear one red and one green. I was a bit out there, with pink hair. The idea of joining any form of bohemia was always alluring.’
And yet, because she was introduced to the public through the aggressive lens of the paparazzi, she wasn’t allowed a slow burn artistic rise. She was in her early twenties and getting started when she began to date the already-famous and very-recently-divorced Jude Law in 2003. Their relationship was thrown into the meat grinder, making her a sensation in the gossip rags before she had even been on cinema screens. ‘I fell in love with someone very famous and that became the story – it was bad timing. I had an amazing time, but it would have been nice if that hadn’t happened before I was known for something else,’ she says. ‘It was a battle to be seen as something else.’
This was a moment when many young women – Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan – were hounded mercilessly in the media, their missteps and marriages and late nights documented as though they were breaking news. Miller was aperfect target: beautiful, stylish and, yes, an enjoyer of good times. As the internet developed into a 24-hour feed of infotainment, her glittering life was a reliable source of content. It’s worth noting that, while many other celebrities of the era crumbled under the pressure, Miller somehow survived.
‘You’re photographed coming out of some pub, you’ve had too much to drink and you’re in your twenties,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t healthy behaviour, but it wasn’t abnormal. I definitely have a hedonistic streak. Thank god I was never a heavy drug user. I was just frivolous in someway. I didn’t have a business head. I wasn’t being well managed.
'I have always been someone who is professional and on time and not an arsehole on set, but I suppose life in between was chaotic. I just don’t think I was ready. I wanted to live. And I did.’
Miller has the court documents to prove how deranged it became. In 2011, she sued tabloid paper News of the World afterword broke that it had been hacking into the phones of prominent people and listening to voicemails. ‘We had a sense something was going on because things were coming out [in the tabloids] that couldn’t have come from another source,’ she says sharply. ‘It was a period of intense paranoia.’
She won the case, accepted £100,000 and an apology, and the tabloid closed that year. In a post-Cambridge Analytica world, when everyone has some eerie sense of being eavesdropped on, Miller was an early witness to the oncoming data dystopia. ‘The emotional response was rage,’ she says. ‘It was nice [to win the case], but, yeah, if you have a phone, it’s probably listening to you.’
She also fell onto the wrong side of Harvey Weinstein, though never sexually, and is extremely careful when discussing it. ‘He called me in to his office – he had just bought [2006’s Factory Girl]. He sat me down, stood up, and said, “You’re not partying any more.” It felt like a paternal lecture,’ she remembers. ‘He slammed the door and I burst into tears, then he came back in and went, “It’s because I’m f*cking proud of you.” And slammed it again.’
At the time, she thought this kind of patronising takedown was a burden that women were expected to bear; suffice to say, she’s thrilled about the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements. ‘Women have been undermined and undervalued,’ she says. ‘That this is happening is essential.’
Miller says her thirties have provided clarity. ‘There’s relief in it for me,’ she says. ‘The stillness, the sense of impending wisdom.’
Now, on the relaxed side of 35, if she continues to find roles like American Woman, she will be in Oscar and BAFTA conversations.
‘It’s raised the standard of what I want to do. I hope to find rich characters with strong arcs who represent real women,’ she says.
The good news for Miller is that she’s playing the long game, and there’s a rich tradition of women actors from the UK getting better as they age, many securing their widest acclaim in their seventies and eighties: Vanessa Redgrave, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Maggie Smith, and Glenda Jackson – who Miller was so thrilled to meet at this year’s Met Gala that she broke her no-cigarette rule to share one with the 83-year-old icon.
‘There are English movie stars who have normal lives and longevity,’ she says. ‘There have been moments when I was incredibly famous and it doesn’t suit me. I just can’t. I’m terrible at it.’
Instead, she’ll continue to pick roles when they are good and when she needs the money, but only when it makes sense with her daughter’s schedule. And she will continue to train at being the best actor she can be. ‘I could have taken routes that would have been bigger and flashier,’ she says. ‘I think I’m at a point where my life is so enriched by other things that a need for approval has completely dispersed. It doesn’t matter to me anymore. I feel like the people who I would want respect from probably respect me.’
Most of all, she will continue to find a balance between celebrity and sanity that works for her. ‘I’m here today, a mother with a career,’ she says, a bit of a shock in her voice that she’s survived and thrived. ‘Looking back, I’m kind of amazed that I managed to get through it.’
American Woman is in cinemas October 11 and ELLE's November issue hits newsstands October 4.
