The eternal sunshine of Sienna Miller
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“It’s getting a bit morning-after-the-night-before,” says Sienna Miller as she poses in a shaggy Ulla Johnson cream coat and bare feet. She’s standing in photographer Sean Thomas’s back garden, hair in Rapunzel-on-Martinis tousles, doing her best impression of a party girl who doesn’t see sunrise as a reason to end the fun. Hairdresser Sam McKnight is on-hand with final touches, and the pair have history. “I did one of my first Vogue covers with Sam,” says Miller.
In fact, her very first Vogue cover was in December 2004, and the coverline declared her “the girl of the year”. 2004 was the British actor’s breakthrough. It was when the crime drama Layer Cake (with Daniel Craig) came out, as well as the romantic comedy Alfie, made with her then-boyfriend Jude Law. It was also the start of her reign as the “queen of boho” – a hippie, thrifty style that made her one of the decade’s fashion rockstars. Who even were you if you weren’t wearing a minidress with a studded belt slung over your hips?
Twenty years later she is the girl – or rather woman – of the year again. She has just appeared as herself in the final season of Larry David’s sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm, designed a fashion collection for Marks & Spencer and become a “friend” of the fashion house Chloé, under fresh new direction from Chemena Kamali. The cultural moment came full circle in February, when Kamali’s debut 1970s-infused collection prompted headlines of “boho is back”.
“Apparently, it’s very much back,” smiles Miller, in an arch way that indicates she knows she’s the anointed oracle – but is also humouring me. The actress, 42, who is more petite than I expected – “I round it up to 5ft 6in” – is sitting in a quiet bedroom at the top of the Fulham townhouse, on a lunchbreak. She wears ecru Margaret Howell jeans, Gucci loafers and a flesh-toned bodysuit from the photoshoot that gives the impression of her having nothing underneath her chunky cardigan. Just as she seemed 20 years ago, she is still friendly, warm and sunny: she still has an immensely girlish air. She’s unguarded and often very funny, swearing intermittently in a honeyed-but-knowing tone that evokes an English boarding-school sixth former sharing gossip with a friend.
All this buzz has coincided with the demands of a seven-month-old baby girl with actor boyfriend Oli Green, and a return to London, having lived for seven years in New York with her tween daughter Marlowe, who she co-parents amicably with actor ex-boyfriend Tom Sturridge (who is now reportedly engaged to that other 2000s icon, Alexa Chung). Her baby is on set being looked after by her nanny; Miller breastfeeds while in hair and make-up, having already been up at 5am to feed. “Everyone will help, but they don’t have tits,” she says. “So there’s only so much other people can do.”
Green, a first-time dad at 27, “was born to be a parent”, she says. “Incredibly wise, very mature – far more than I am.” They had their first kiss at a cat-themed Halloween party in New York in 2021. “The first few months of this year were idyllic because I was in a total maternity bubble,” she says. “We went to Costa Rica for three weeks with the kids and then when I landed back it all began. It is intense, when, really, all I want to do is be at home being a mum.”
If Miller is tired, she gives good game face. “I am an optimistic person,” she says. “I’m good at focusing on the good.” I can see what her fashion designer sister Savannah Miller means when she tells me that “when she was born, I remember it was like the lights came on, like the entertainment had arrived. She was so amusing, so funny and quick… she has sunshine pouring out of her.” Sam McKnight puts it more directly: “She’s not saccharine. She’s a nice girl, but she’s naughty.”
Miller was born in New York to Edwin, a banker-turned-art dealer, and Josephine, who variously worked as a PA to David Bowie and manager of the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York; she moved to the UK at 18 months. Her parents split when she was five; she lived mainly with her mother and Savannah in Fulham; and at eight she went to The Manor boarding school in Wiltshire, where she had a pony and a rabbit. She later boarded at Heathfield School in Berkshire, which counts the late Isabella Blow among its alumni.
She was always very stylish. At the height of her relationship with Law, her influence was off the charts. Asked how they developed their distinctive dress sense, Savannah, who is three years older, recalls that “we were inspired by this lodger who would kind of wear every print and colour under the sun. So we’d have these plastic hair extensions and [wear] multicolours… There was space to find what resonated with you as an individual. And Sienna always had a very visionary approach.”
Did living up to style-icon status become oppressive? “I found it flattering in equal parts,” Miller says now. “But I didn’t want it to eclipse the other work that I did. And I think it still does. People come up to me and say, ‘Oh my God, I love your style’, and I’m like, ‘What about my films?’”
Ah yes, the films. The peculiar anomaly in the story of Sienna Miller is that for all her efforts, her charm and her charisma, her acting career has never quite matched her level of fame. That’s despite solid roles as Tippi Hedren in 2012’s The Girl, for which she received Bafta and Golden Globe nominations, and in the intriguing Netflix miniseries Anatomy of a Scandal (2022). Her latest is Kevin Costner’s passion project Horizon: An American Saga, a four-part Western set during and just before the American Civil War in which Miller plays Frances Kittredge, a settler in an Arizona frontier town. The first film premiered in Cannes and should have been a major break for Miller – but the box office has been so woeful that, in July, Costner’s Territory Pictures and New Line Cinema decided to hold the second part from its August release date. Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2 will be released, they say, when audiences have had more time to discover the first instalment.
“Of course it’s disappointing for everybody,” Miller will tell me later. “But these do take time for people to discover, and I think that there is a real audience for them. I think Kevin’s intention was always to have these films seen on a big screen, but I understand that it’s a big ask of people and it’s a lot to bite off being released within six weeks of each other. Certainly with the first film, it’s really establishing a world, and that requires patience. It’s a different climate now to what going to the cinema used to be… now people have culture and entertainment in their pocket.”
It’s clear Miller is frustrated not to have taken her career to the next level, or positioned herself in Hollywood’s A-list. Bohemian in style, and bohemian in spirit, she says she has been “very frivolous in how I made choices… and I think now I’m going to be very selective about what I do… It’s really, really hard to make a good film and I think I just want to pay a little bit more attention to ingredients and try to get to a place where I’m on that list and working with the top directors, which I feel like I’ve dipped a toe into, but I wouldn’t say I was the automatic choice. And I’m curious as to how I can change that.” Yes, how do you? She laughs: “I have no idea!”
The setbacks with Horizon are disheartening, but Miller is still a fixture in British culture: backstage at Glastonbury, at Wimbledon in a garden-party-but-make-it-edgy polkadot ensemble, and now as an ambassador for the King’s Foundation (formerly the Prince’s Foundation, a charity supporting education, often via craft and design), for which she went to Dumfries House to look at the “incredible work” they are doing. The truth is, perhaps, that Miller is never more engaging, nor appealing, than when playing herself. Like her performance in Curb, for example, which reflected a version of her sunny, optimistic personality. In the sitcom actors are given a scenario, but no dialogue. She gives me an example: “‘Sienna’ has to flirt with Larry David, invite him to dinner… Go! It’s very improvised. And he’ll throw curve balls of course, but he is wonderfully relaxed on set and gets the giggles. I realised that actually you can go to work and not have to cry and torture yourself. So I’d quite like to have a bit more fun at work.”
In the meantime, she’s having fun alongside it. At the premiere of Horizon in May, Miller wore a powder-blue ruffled Chloé dress custom-made for her by Kamali. She first met the designer in February at the show and is pleased by boho’s comeback: “I think it’s so refreshing to see feminine, soft, pretty clothes again.” Kamali, meanwhile, says she invited Miller because she’s “one of the original Chloé girls of that era [the 2000s], and at the time, there was this really unique energy in fashion. She was mixing the perfect flea-market finds together with designer pieces and she made it very personal, less studied and very much about that free, intuitive way of dressing.” (That said, the designer declares, “The word boho was never really in my vocabulary, to be honest. It’s just the natural spirit of Chloé.”)
Kamali senses a longing for freedom and authenticity in fashion – both qualities that Miller clearly has. “Her personal style obviously is something that has evolved over the years,” says the designer, “but she always kept that effortlessness.” “I wasn’t thinking about any of it,” says Miller of her style, “and I think that’s what people responded to, that it was quite authentic. I had the time to play around with things and I was living near Portobello Market, so I would go there all the time.”
She sees the boho look play out differently today. “The Gen Z interpretation is kind of the things that we [older millennials] would never have worn,” she says. “More of the naffer elements of Y2K… the wraparound glasses. It’s a mash-up… the interpretation isn’t as authentically bohemian as it was. It’s kind of a twist.” She sees it on the street and on social media – when she lets herself be on it. “I creep [on Instagram]: I’m an Instacreep. I lurk. I’ve got a private one and I’m endlessly deleting the app and then, you know, going onto the web and whatever. But I don’t think it’s good for people, though of course there’s good sides to it. Undeniably. And I find great things having just had a baby – like baby floats for summer. My algorithm is literally just babies. Babies and animals. But the fact we’re in an attention economy is difficult, it’s sad. It’s hard raising children in it as well.”
It’s inevitable that she’s cautious: throughout the mid-2000s Miller was harassed by obsessive media attention. She was chased, spat on and accosted by photographers: one rolled onto the bonnet of the car she was travelling in to get a shot. She became one of the leading voices in the phone-hacking scandal: in 2011 she settled for £100,000 in damages and costs after News of the World hacked into her mobile phone. She later appeared at the Leveson Inquiry into media ethics to recount the mental damage and anxiety the episode had caused.
Miller resents the fact that the scandal has become part of her story. “Without a shadow of a doubt, it affected the trajectory of my life and behaviour, so I feel like I sort of survived something, which I’ve said probably 800,000 times, and I’d love to think of something original to say about it, but it’s difficult.” She refuses to be weighed down by the past. “I really lived my 20s in the way that I think you should,” she continues. “It’s just a pity that all of it’s so heavily documented, but I know I would say resoundingly my life experience has been one that’s pretty fun.”
She’s less worried about press intrusion now, but maintaining boundaries isn’t easy. At Cannes her daughter wasn’t supposed to be on the red carpet, but she ran up to Miller while she was posing. “So, then it was: ‘She’s made her red-carpet debut at Cannes’, which is chic. But, you know, I fought for privacy for my family for a long time. So that’s out the window.” Later, when asked if she’d like to marry Green she demurs: “That’ll be the headline that’s picked up.”
Miller’s smile rarely falters. “There’s something really emancipating about this decade [40s],” she says. “The confidence of knowing who you are and the people that matter knowing who you are, too.” Expecting to find being back in the baby zone a shock, “it’s actually heaven”, she says. Marlowe’s arrival, when Miller was 30, was “a whiplash of life. Having been very free and careless and kind of a bit of a leaf in the wind, to be grounded in that way overnight… I found it much easier this time in all aspects. I think I’m an advocate for having babies older if you’re able – which I was, luckily.” She feels fortunate on a professional level too. “I think I timed 40 at the exact right time for the industry… 10 or 20 years ago you were kind of out to pasture at 40, which is absurd because you have so much more texture and depth and ability to express yourself. Now there’s just more awareness about what it is to be a woman in this world.”
Only the previous evening she had a “lightbulb moment” conversation with someone who told her that she’s a brand. “I don’t like thinking of myself as a brand, but it was more in relation to how the business and the personal get very muddled – and I have to learn to distinguish between the two.”
Whether Miller sees herself as a brand or not, she has become a pretty strong one. She’s looking into launching skincare, and after six years of on-off development she’s zoning in on a “miracle” concentrate. Then again, she’s exhausted by the number of celebrity ranges and the prospect of promoting it. “It wouldn’t be under my name,” she says. “I’ve got to find out if there is a Phoebe Philo way of doing this.”
This is one of many “unprocessed thoughts” that she seems to be working out. “Do you guys always become like a therapy session?” she asks. “Free therapy, and there it is in print. Nice.” Has she had much actual therapy? “Lots.”
Hair, Sam McKnight at Premier Hair and Make-up using Hair by Sam McKnight. Make-up, Celia Burton. Nails, Jenni Draper at Premier Hair and Make-up using Chanel. Digital operator, James Naylor. Stylist’s assistants, Aylin Bayhan and Lucia Bustillo. Production, Town. Shot at Sean Thomas’s home. Special thanks to India Standing
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