On the morning I meet Sienna Miller in London, she has just attended a prenatal yoga class—the first of her pregnancy. She went down the street to the neighborhood place and was reminded of how pleasant it is to be in the presence of other pregnant women. Also, no one blinked. Or if they did, she tells me, they did “a very good job hiding it.”
Miller, 41, is already mother to Marlowe (whom she co-parents with the actor Tom Sturridge), and now is having another girl. She’s 28 weeks into the pregnancy, with boyfriend Oli Green, 27, an actor with whom she has been in a relationship since 2021. Today she’s dressed in a black tank top and roomy, low-hanging Levi’s, held up by what looks like a silk sash; her hair is hanging long and loose in a way that many a stylist would undoubtedly spend hours trying to emulate. Two dogs—Walter, a mini dachshund, and Tennessee, a rescue from the American South—swirl around our ankles as we form a plan. The agenda had been refreshingly vague—though she warns me that she’s starving.
There was a time when Miller’s life was far more prescribed by external pressures, dictated by the punishing rhythms of paparazzi chases and high-profile romances. But if her schedule now allows for morning yoga and improvised lunches, it’s also a different kind of whirlwind. She’s arguably at a creative peak, having delivered a series of complex, nuanced performances in recent years: a mother coming to terms, over the course of decades, with the disappearance of her daughter in 2018’s American Woman; the wronged wife of a Tory MP in the delicious 2022 Netflix series Anatomy of a Scandal. Last spring, she finished shooting the second installment of Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga, a Civil War–era, multi-film opus that covers a 15-year period during the settlement of the American West.
It’s a project with uncommon ambition, one that has been gestating for 30 years. Costner began the script back in 1988, and as he revised it through many drafts, the story took on the scale of a Western epic, a return to the wide-screen grandeur of his Oscar-winning directorial debut, Dances With Wolves. (Costner put up money for the production; he’s pointed out that no one wanted to finance Dances either.) Horizon tells the story of a 19th-century frontier settlement, which grows from tent encampment to established town over the course of the films. Miller is to appear in all of them, as an East Coast settler, named Frances Kittredge, with her husband and two children. The first two “chapters” are due to be released by Warner Bros. this summer.
Horizon’s shoot, in Utah last summer, was additionally meaningful for Miller (and not just because she venerated Costner growing up—even naming a pair of pet rabbits after his character’s wolf and horse in Dances). She describes the production as feeling more like an independent film than a big-budget studio movie: If the light hit the red rock canyons of Moab in a particularly beautiful way, the crew could get in their vans and quickly move to capture the shot. Costner, Miller says, created an entire universe: “You could ask him anything about this period in time, and he would have an answer.”
Miller filmed her scenes in a corset while enduring the first waves of morning sickness. “There was a lot of being buried under rubble and being shot at,” she says, “and a lot of time in a very dark tunnel. There are scorpions and snakes, and it’s blisteringly hot. But I actually love that kind of work—I like feeling completely battered and bruised and spent by the end of the day.” She wasn’t rolling around in pristine studio dust, manufactured to create an illusion, she points out, but in a real hole in the Utah desert, “spitting out bits of earth for the next week.” Costner filmed Miller’s sequences together, in part to avoid any difficulties that might arise from her pregnancy.
Meanwhile, Marlowe was finishing up the school year in New York, and Miller, who had lived in the city for a happy seven years, was making preparations to move to London. The pandemic had shifted things for her—New York changed, and so had she. Green played a role in this thinking too. They’d met at a Halloween party thrown by a mutual friend, and as their romance blossomed, the idea of relocating to London became increasingly appealing. Green was born and raised there, and Miller’s UK support system, the scaffolding all parents need, was still very much in place. She has her sister (the designer Savannah Miller); her mother; and her oldest, closest friend, Tori Cook (also her publicist; they went to boarding school together). She decided with her ex, Sturridge, whom she counts among her beloved friends, that they would move their co-parenting arrangement across the Atlantic. Miller sold the West Village town house she had bought in 2021 (“I’m the only person I know that could sell a place in the West Village and not make a profit”), and she and Green settled, temporarily, into his parents’ West London home. “They were very tolerant of the circus,” she deadpans.
Miller and Green now have a rented house of their own—the place where I pick her up. Several works of art are still leaning against the wall, waiting to be hung, and some pieces of furniture feel a bit ill-sized for the rooms in which they have landed. (“We’re obviously going to get a bigger table,” she says sheepishly of a four-seater floating in a room that could host a banquet.) But there is warmth and charm, as well; there’s a large black-and-white photo of Marlowe that Sturridge took hanging in the entryway, Miller has hung her own curtains, and the primary bathroom has an excellent tub. In February, when they figure out what London school Marlowe will attend more permanently, Miller and Green will look for a place near the school. “I like that it’s open,” she says. “I don’t do well when life is prescribed.”
As we settle at our table at the restaurant she’s chosen—a quiet, brick-walled place off Kensington High Street, where the waiters are so busy chatting in Italian that we have to flag them down to request a Pellegrino—Miller tells me about the expectations she put upon herself when she was pregnant with Marlowe: “I spent so much time preparing for the birth, and absolutely no thought was given to what happens when I’d get home with a baby. At least now I’m aware of what that’s like.”
Back then Miller had her heart set on a “natural” birth, with Savannah (who had delivered several times at home) as her doula. It didn’t work out that way: She was induced at the hospital and 27 hours of grueling labor followed. “It was like a horrible trick of the universe,” she says. “I was like, This can’t be what my sister felt at home in her birthing pool.” She was eventually given an emergency C-section, a destabilizing experience. “It was so essential in my mind that I got it ‘right.’ And so emblematic of the kind of mother I would be that I didn’t. But I know in retrospect that was just the demons of new motherhood.” This time, she says, “I just don’t think I’ll put that pressure on myself.” She still wants to try for a natural birth, and she’s recently switched to a doctor who is aligned with that goal.
There’s an unguardedness to Miller that, even minutes after meeting her, wins you over to her side. (She and I are almost immediately exchanging not only delivery stories, but also book and theater recommendations: She has just finished Madeline Miller’s Circe and has been on a Haruki Murakami bent, and insists that I see the mind-bending one-man Vanya on the West End starring Andrew Scott—she even offers to help me get tickets.) If she wants a natural birth, then I am rooting for that for her, too. But I also have a sense of the looming archetypes behind our conversation—those that have dogged our gender for…ever? All of us are subject to these kinds of impossible measurements (the “natural” mother, for one), and all women, to some extent, apply them to themselves. But for someone like Miller who has experienced public attention and scrutiny for half her life, they must be particularly tenacious.
Then there is age, another trap: In 2023 women are still, it seems, meant to act “their age,” whatever that means. Stray from it (by, say, falling in love with a 27-year-old), and there will be headlines. (Fewer, needless to say, for famous men, who rarely elicit the kind of scorn Miller has endured, especially from the British tabloids.) Several times, Miller jokes about the fact that our conversation has turned to midlife subjects: her fondness for the interior design of Rose Uniacke or elderly parents—a gentle way of disarming the sharp edges of societal prescriptions.
It’s easy to ascribe a kind of implicit politics to Miller’s choices, to think that by baring her pregnant stomach on the red carpet or dating whomever she pleases, she’s making life just a bit easier for all women. But she insists she is simply driven by instinct and not immune to insecurities. “I’d love to get to a point where I didn’t feel the need to make a joke of my being older and having a baby,” she tells me, “to show I’m in on the joke.” As for the stunning two-piece Schiaparelli ensemble she wore at Vogue World in September in London, “I was nervous about the idea of it,” she says, “but once I had it on, everything else felt boring. I was like, I’ll have that photo for the rest of my baby’s life. It’s kind of fascinating to fight your own prejudice against yourself. I’m constantly doing that.”
After lunch, we head to pick up Marlowe, who is waiting at the entrance when we pull up. “She’s going to scowl at me because I’m late,” Miller says. “I mean, she has all the power in our dynamic.” Miller wanted more children for a long time, she tells me. “I felt so bad that Marlowe didn’t have a little partner in crime,” she says, “so I became that for her. I think I tried to compensate for every bit that she was lacking.”
When we arrive back at the house, Green is sitting on the sofa, working on his laptop, a rangy, comfortable figure. Tall and dark-haired, he will soon appear in the final season of The Crown as Rupert Finch, a classmate of Prince William’s, and has just finished filming a Civil War drama for Paramount, The Gray House (another Costner-connected production). Today he’s waiting to meet a window-box lady; his parents have given her services to the couple as a housewarming gift.
Miller and I descend to the lower-level kitchen so she can prepare dinner. She quickly dices onion, carrots, and celery for a chicken to rest on as it roasts, while I am put to work peeling potatoes. Cauliflower is blanched on the stove, while she grates a thick block of cheddar. As she moves swiftly round the kitchen, she tells me about the start of their relationship. There was a kiss right when they met, and then she retreated. “I was like, This is absurd. This will not go anywhere,” she says. “And then he worked hard to persuade me to go out for a drink with him.” She asked her good friend Emily Blunt to tag along on one of their early dates in New York—an unnecessary wingwoman, as Blunt now tells it: “When I got there, it was so beautiful between them. I just gave her a hug and went, ‘I’m going to slip away.’ ” Miller and Green both came down with covid at the same time, so they sent Marlowe to live with Sturridge and moved in together for the week, an experience that “sort of fast-tracked intimacy.”
“I see so much of her in him,” says Blunt of Green, “in that free-spirited, curious, guileless thing that he has.He’s the kind of guy you could just bring anywhere, and everyone would love him.” Her friend also notes that Sienna always wanted another child. “We’ve talked about it for years,” says Blunt. “She just needed the right person, and I really see that in him.”
Green comes downstairs to report on the window-box lady’s assessment, and though I am meant to be interviewing his girlfriend, we fall into an easy conversation that swings between the NBA (he and Miller were semiregular Knicks fans at Madison Square Garden), directors he might like to work with (he was watching clips on his laptop), the Premier League (he and Miller support Chelsea), and US politics (his cousin is Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin, who represents the 7th District of Michigan). He was raised by parents who made their careers in the art world; his grandfather started London’s Richard Green gallery. The oldest of three boys, he rebuffed the pressure put on him by his parents to lead by example. “I was like, I don’t want to do the right thing,” he says. Green attended Tisch at New York University for a year before dropping out and enrolling in the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York. Green and Miller together are, in fact, such engaging conversationalists that I feel I could linger for hours. But the chicken is now in the oven, and Marlowe, having finished her homework with Sturridge, who had stopped by to help her, has descended in a fluffy pink terrycloth robe and would appreciate her mother’s attention. It’s time to head out.
A few days later, before Miller meets with her new ob-gyn, we sit down for lunch at St. John in Marylebone. Miller shows me a picture of a crib she had screenshotted and sent to Green’s mother; it’s a beautiful wicker structure with a floaty muslin canopy, exactly what you might imagine boho queen Sienna Miller would pick for her newborn daughter. As Green’s mother had duly reminded her, though, this is not a crib for an infant. Such is the rhythm of parenting young children: a quixotic vision, and then a reality check.
Green’s family has been warm and welcoming, Miller says: “I would imagine it would be complicated for anyone to get their head around, but there’s been nothing but love and joy.” There is no stickiness in the way she speaks about the age difference—but it is clearly something she’s considered. “I don’t think you can legislate on matters of the heart. I certainly have never been able to,” she tells me. To whatever extent she humors the idea that perhaps someday Green might want to be with someone younger, she also thinks it cuts both ways: “For Oli, it is real that I might want to be with someone older.” Miller sees, furthermore, a wisdom in Green that exceeds the capacities of older people she has previously been with. Part of this is how he was raised. But it also is the result of growing up steeped in a different era, she suggests, and several of her friends agree. “Female friends of mine in their 40s—they’re meeting younger people who are seeing women as three-dimensional figures,” says Jeremy O. Harris, a friend who once, somewhat inadvertently, moved in with Miller for several weeks during the pandemic. “I do want to credit that to some level of the feminist movement working.”
“I see it with Oli’s friends,” Miller says as we order our lunch. “There’s awareness of the dynamics that enter relationships between men and women now that we just didn’t have 20 or 25 years ago. I feel like my whole adolescence was dodging bullets and advances in a really delicate way, to not offend somebody. Whereas the girls that he grew up with, they’re probably like, No—no, thank you. Moving on.”
Though she seems to see herself as having come of age in a more deferential era, everyone I speak to about Miller emphasizes that her breezy sunniness actually radiates from a fierce and solid core. “I haven’t had the horrible experiences that she had to go through as a younger woman. But we both know about the scorn, the false friendships,” says Kristin Scott Thomas, who cast Miller in her 2023 directorial debut, North Star, as a famous actor returning home to her mother’s ramshackle-chic country cottage for a wedding. “We know you have to be quite sturdy. It’s not a word you would associate with Sienna Miller, but she is quite sturdy.”
This is particularly true, it seems, when it comes to her devotion to her closest friends. “She’s so effervescent and wonderful, but she’s not to be fucked with,” Blunt says. The actor describes to me a night in New York in which Miller coaxed the newly postpartum Blunt out to a bar and then on to Alan Cumming’s nightclub, Club Cumming. “It was a sort of reclamation of my identity," Blunt says. "I had been feeling that animalistic sense of just being someone’s mother for weeks on end. And I remember having to pump and dump because it was just so much fun. I’ll just say, I do not go out like that. But when you are out with her, it’s sort of intoxicating.”
“We both went through periods in our life when so much of what was happening around us was out of our control,” says her friend Huma Abedin. “We were kind of floating through all that was incoming from the outside, and she’s always handled herself with grace. I have had a couple of experiences walking down the street with her and paparazzi calling out really unkind things. And she’ll just block them. There’s a couple of photos of her grabbing my hand, saying, ‘I’m going to stop this.’ ” Harris recalls dance-offs in which he and Miller would judge Marlowe’s performances as though she were on The X Factor and then curl up in bed together and watch The Crown. When both he and Sturridge were nominated but didn’t take home a Tony one year, Miller hosted their very-late-night “losers party” at her house. “Tom and I both gave the speeches we would’ve given had we won,” he says, “and then Sienna made us drinks and rubbed our backs all night.”
“Once you’ve entered Sienna’s life,” Harris adds, “it’s hard to want to leave.”
When I meet up with Miller in New York, a few weeks later, she has been staying at her friend Cara Delevingne’s Gramercy apartment, and the place is a tableau of happy chaos. There’s a large Louis Vuitton suitcase spilling its contents in the foyer. In the TV room, there are the remains of a sleepover Marlowe has just hosted for a handful of her old friends: open canisters of Pringles, scattered soda cans, a large tangle of duvets. Miller’s friend Cook and Green are chatting in the kitchen. Miller has just made a big batch of pancakes for everyone.
She tells me she is suddenly feeling especially pregnant; between fittings for her Vogue shoot, she went shopping with Marlowe, and it became clear that she was no longer comfortable walking for long periods of time. The only clothes she’s interested in at the moment are things with a lot of stretch; she’s just bought a bunch of dresses from Urban Outfitters. The pregnancy has also meant that at least two theater projects that had been scheduled for 2024 have had to move forward without her—though she is laying the groundwork to join a stage adaptation of the 1940s Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell vehicle His Girl Friday that will likely open in London in 2025. And she is brimming with delight about the episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which she will appear this February, playing an actor named “Sienna,” a (very) heightened version of herself. This will be a new mode for her, as she points out, since she’s never really done comedy. “For the longest time, I felt the need to really prove something, and I can see that reflected in the choices that I made. I pursued roles that were very heavy and very dramatic and challenging emotionally because I felt that I was probably seen as frivolous,” she says. “I’m now completely over that.”
I’ve asked Miller to make the 15-minute walk from Gramercy to a café inside The Well spa in Union Square that serves smoothies with abstract names like “rise” and coconut yogurt with gluten-free granola. Amid the onslaught of New York, I’d envisioned it as offering a little insulated calm. But New York, with all its excitement and anxieties, has found her, even in just the few days she’s been back. She celebrated Green’s 27th birthday with his friends the night they flew in. (She jokes about the relief she feels in no longer dating a 26-year-old.) They went to Holiday Bar (owned by their friend, who got them a table); Harris and his fiancé stopped by. And then the couple went out to a raucous dinner with friends at Via Carota the following night, during which Abedin and another friend, Justin Theroux, ordered just about every dish on the menu for them. (She pauses to note that her baby is doing gymnastics in her belly, perhaps remembering the feast.) And at this very moment, she is experiencing the acute concern that comes from unleashing her preteen on to the streets of Manhattan and the aisles of Sephora. “As soon as we landed back in New York, she was a precocious little New Yorker,” she says. “Walking around, they’re just exposed to it all here.”
We had talked broadly about the pressures children and young women face (phones, social media, the ever-expanding range of reality-distorting filters), but I had been hesitant to talk too much about the scrutiny she, specifically, endured in her past: the regular, constant tailing by cameramen, the phone hacking by the British tabloid press, the relentless dissection of her relationships. (At one point, the paparazzi’s pursuit was so intense that Miller began to use a secret camera to gather evidence of their attempts to corner her at night.) The future is bright! A baby!
But as I’ve learned, no topic is really taboo for Miller, and when I ask her how she came out the other side of all that harsh attention with such an open heart and profoundly generous spirit, it becomes clear that wherever she’s going in life, she’s carrying her past with her. “I’ve really thought about the rubbernecking part of human beings,” she says. “What makes us slow down to look at something we know will make us feel dreadful? Is it because we’re happy that it’s not us? The tabloid media really exploited that weak chink in our psychology.”
But she doesn’t look back at the past only as a scorched earth that she had to traverse. There was heartbreak and pain, yes, but there was also a lot of fun too. And it occurs to me that this insight and self-awareness may be what has kept her open. She describes a 2007 Guardian interview that became somewhat infamous for some throwaway, careless comments: “I was talking about taking mushrooms and being laddie. And I remember being so terrified when it came out. Everyone was so upset. Everyone was like, Why can’t you just shut up for a minute?” She called up the journalist, asking him how he could publish something that was so obviously damaging, and he talked her through his reasoning. “He said, ‘I’m sorry that you’re upset, but I think when you are older, you are going to look back on this and love this article. It’ll be a real capsule of who you were at that moment.’ And actually I did many years later go back and read it, and I was like, She’s great.”
We walk back to the apartment, eyes peeled for a roving Marlowe and her gaggle of friends, and I remember something Miller had told me earlier in reference to her relationship with Green: There are fundamentally two kinds of people in the world, those who carefully govern their lives and those who are guided by their instincts. “I think you either live your life with caution or you take risks,” she’d said. It was clear in which camp she was placing herself, though she wasn’t necessarily endorsing her approach. “That sounds like I’m sort of saying: That’s brave and that’s great,” she’d said, “but I don’t mean it that way at all.” Rather, she meant that following her heart had led her on some great adventures. She regretted none of them—and there were many more to come.
In this story: hair, Evanie Frausto using Bumble and Bumble; makeup, Diane Kendal.
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