The actress Sienna Miller stepped from the lobby of a Lower East Side Hotel into the path of an animated woman professing love and fandom. The woman, who held a video camera, had been sent by the tabloid site TMZ.
Miller walked on. An actress since her late teens and a paparazzi fixation for just as long, her work has often been overshadowed by an eventful personal life and an obsession with her style.
At 44, and even recently postpartum, Miller remains effortlessly cool, a whirl of wide-leg jeans, swingy blond hair and nicotine pills. Yet she has always been more than an It Girl, even if directors and producers were slow to notice this. She has a desert-dry sense of humor, a casual frankness and an irresistible gift for intimacy. Let’s just say that within 10 minutes of meeting, we were in the otherwise empty basement of an Orchard Street vintage shop, in our underwear, trying on past-season couture.
“I don’t get out much,” she said, laughing as she took off her jeans. The pantsuit she tried on, a 1990s Gaultier houndstooth number, looked as if it had been sewn just for her.
Miller’s career has been variable in quality, if not in type. In addition to her many girlfriends and wives, she has played actresses of one kind or another in more than a dozen films, series and plays.
This casting is obvious — Miller has the Hollywood glamour and, for better or worse, the fame. But this stereotyping also suggests that she is seen more for her glossy surfaces than for anything underneath. The irony is ugly: She is repeatedly asked to play actresses even as she has struggled to be taken seriously as a performer. (That TMZ camerawoman wasn’t there to talk craft.)
“It’s funny, because I have no interest now in playing an actress or somebody who has paparazzi,” she said.
In “War,” a new HBO anthology series from the showrunner George Kay (“Criminal,” “Lupin,” “Hijack”), Miller plays another actress. But this time, by leveraging the gap between public performance and private pain, and by bringing the force of her charisma and sympathy to what might otherwise have been an unlikable character, she hopes to complicate that role.
Her character, Carla Duval, has been served with divorce papers by Dominic West’s tech mogul Morgan Henderson. Carla is, like Miller, a famous actress and a subject of media criticism. Unlike Miller, she girds herself in a thick sheen of narcissism. “I found it would be interesting to play someone who operates in the world that I exist in with a very different personality,” Miller said.
“I spend a lot of time with a thermometer up everybody in any room, just gauging how everybody is,” she continued. “I don’t think she’s at all invested in the feelings of others or their responses to her, which was really relieving.”
Miller became an actress because she has never been able to imagine anything else. As a schoolgirl, she rarely had good parts and wanted them desperately. “Maybe I was too eager,” she said.
After graduating at 17, she spent a few months in New York, studying at the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute, which she recalls as “very therapeutic and strange and kind of embarrassing.” Within a few years, she had a part on a TV show, and soon after she was cast in multiple films, picking up a little more technique with every job. It wasn’t until the 2006 film “Factory Girl,” in which she played the Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick, that she felt confident as an actress.
“I realized that this is what I was supposed to be doing, and I had access to things I didn’t know I could access,” she said.
But in those years she was better known as a party girl, a famous girlfriend (she had relationships with the actors Jude Law, Tom Sturridge and Balthazar Getty) and an avatar of bohemian chic. The paparazzi were relentless, so invasive that she eventually sued them, accepting a settlement.
She describes that time as “a very hazy blur, wrapped up in all sorts of chaos and trauma.” Paradoxically, it made her even more committed to her career.
“I had to get to a place where I was able to be taken seriously,” she said.
At 30, while engaged to Sturridge, she gave birth to a daughter, which seemed to quiet some of the attention around her. She resented what this implied, but she welcomed the reprieve.
“I was suddenly able to be seen as someone with some substance, because I was a mother now,” she said.
Gradually the roles became better (“Foxcatcher,” “American Sniper,” “21 Bridges”), including a starring turn in the Netflix limited series “Anatomy of a Scandal” (2022). She played the embattled wife of a politician accused of assault, a crisis compounded by media scrutiny.
The role echoed certain aspects of her own history, which wasn’t lost on her. While she took the part for its depth, “I probably was also curious in a slightly sadistic way to revisit that,” she said.
We were back at the hotel by the time she said this. A woman lunching nearby came over to gush about how much she had loved that show. This was a real fan, not a paparazzo, and Miller was perfectly friendly. “I paid her,” she said dryly, as the woman left.
Since “Anatomy of a Scandal,” Miller has had two children with her partner, the actor Oli Green. The youngest, 5 months old, came with her to New York. (Before lunch, she took time to give him a cuddle.) Though her pregnancy is invisible in “War,” which shot near her London home, she was more than eight months along by the time filming ended.
Kay, who created the series, knew he needed a film star to play a film star. “Camera presence is not something you can act,” he said. He had written the character of an actress to emphasize how a divorce plays out both in public and in private, and he was impressed with Miller’s ability to play the role on at least two levels.
“You can see her keeping her head held high but having a private stress in her eyes,” he said.
“War” is ambivalent as to Carla’s talent, and even Miller is uncertain of Carla’s gifts. “I don’t know that there’s a huge depth to her,” she said. But while Kay had conceived the character as mannered, narcissistic and high-strung, Miller made her softer, more human.
“Sienna brings this naturalism without losing any status,” Kay said.
West, who first worked with her 20 years ago, in a production of “As You Like It,” recalled the frenzy back then. (While the play was running, Law, then her fiancé, admitted to an affair.)
“She was pursued by paparazzi the whole time, and there was quite a siege mentality, even in the theater,” he said. Now “there’s a wonderful freedom to her and a real naturalness and a playfulness.”
Miller is thankful to be mostly free of that siege, but she knows it has colored her career. It’s not an accident that she is so often offered the role of a woman in the public eye, a woman who exists to be seen. She spoke feelingly of making the upcoming film “Madden,” from the director David O. Russell, in which she plays the part owner of an N.F.L. team.
“That reinvigorated a passion for what I do in a way that I needed,” she said.
She plans to return to the theater and is proud of a craft that is “ever-evolving and deepening as I become an ever-evolved, deeper person,” she said. She craves deeper roles to match, but even if the offers to play actresses keep flooding in, she can accept it.
She pointed to a tattoo on her upper arm of three stars, which she had acquired on a beach in Mexico in early 20s, one for each child she hoped to have. Professional discontent seemed small in comparison.
“Without sounding schmaltzy, life is pretty wonderful,” she said.
Cinematography by Shane Gambill.
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