The actress is one of the figures in the recent series of the streaming platform.
Two years ago, when Sienna Miller received the scripts for Anatomy of a Scandal, a high-profile limited series from David E. Kelley and Melissa James Gibson, she read through them. "I read them the way you want to read a six-part drama," she said.
She was offered the role of Sophie, the silky wife of James (Rupert Friend), a minister of Parliament. Sophie would require the full range of Miller's abilities and gifts: charisma, vulnerability, beauty, wit.
And in a career in which she has been relegated for the most part to supporting roles of wife and girlfriend, Sophie is solidly the lead. And yet Miller hesitated. "I had my reservations because it seemed kind of ugly and familiar," she said.
The start of the series
In the first episode, Sophie learns that James had an affair with a co-worker. For Miller, who had come through a scandal in the mid-2000s in which her then-fiancé Jude Law slept with her children's nanny, the resonances were obvious.
But in the same way that one feels compelled to run one's fingers over a scar once the wound has healed, the chance to revisit these past experiences became part of Miller's attraction to her role. "In the weird, twisted way that it exists, I was drawn to that, to explore it from a different perspective," she said.
This was on a recent weekday morning at a boutique hotel restaurant in Manhattan's West Village, near where Miller lives with her 9-year-old daughter, Ella Marlowe. In Anatomy of a Scandal, which hit Netflix on Friday, Sophie dresses in luxurious golds, creams, and grays.
Miller had worn the same color palette that morning, with off-white jeans and a beige sweater, with overlapping necklaces at the neck.
Person and character
Of course, Miller is not Sophie. She is liberal where Sophie is conservative, she is expressive where Sophie is limited. Sophie plays a role, that of the perfect politician's wife, for personal reasons. For Miller, role-playing is strictly professional. Her off-camera personality is unaffected and she is open. However, there are moments in Anatomy of a Scandal where Sophie's life seems confused by the actress who plays her.
For example, a scene from the last episode, in which Sophie is facing an antagonist who is not. "My whole life I was underrated and overrated at the same time," she says. "If I traded the currency the world told me was mine, well, that's what I've been taught to do." It's hard to tell who's talking.
These parallels were not lost on Sarah Vaughan, who created the character of Sophie in her 2018 novel and is an executive producer on the series. They bring "an extra level of nuance and meaning to her performance," Vaughan said.
In the filming of the series, Miller also consciously turned to her past. "There's kind of a muscle memory of a lot of the experiences of her that I personally have. So I was quite available," she said. Sometimes, he was almost too available."
Friend, speaking on the phone, said Miller can give herself over to a character so completely that she seems practically possessed. "Sienna herself will be physically altered, she will be sweating or shaking, or her heart rate will have increased, or a tic will have occurred that she could never have planned," she said.
When it came time to shoot the scene where Sophie finds out about her husband's affair, Miller's heart started beating so fast and so hard that it registered on her microphone. "The feeling that something is about to come out and you have no control over it, the anxiety of knowing you have a dream before something intensely personal becomes extremely public, it's a state of agony," he said.
However, in the end, Sophie handles her situation differently than Miller did. Saying anything else risks spoilers, but Sophie's approach to reputation damage didn't seem like an option for Miller at the time, so playing Sophie's narrative was liberating, even therapeutic, she said.
"There's a catharsis to all of this," Miller said. Every time you go to work and cry, you feel weirdly good."
"He deserves all the challenges"
Seeing Miller in the role, Vaughan noted the rawness of her performance, her seeming honesty. And something else. "I don't know if I'm interpreting it because I know what he's been through," Vaughan said. "I think there is an anger in her, but a suppressed anger."
When asked where that anger came from, Miller said, "At this point in my 40s, I've had experiences that I've internalized and can use: betrayal and a frustration at how much I accepted and didn't hold back and the low self-esteem I had.
She said it with a smile, but there was also something sharp underneath. Gibson, the show's director, noted Miller's ability to hold more than one emotional truth — anger, resignation, wry amusement — at once, giving performances of it a natural complexity.
"She deserves every challenge," Gibson said, "because she's up to it."
More self-esteem
Today, Miller has more self-esteem. She has cost him a couple of decades, a dozen more roles and the birth of a son, but now he knows who she is. Sophie's speech about being underrated and overrated continues. She tells her adversary, "A lot of people think they know me. You think you know me. Trust me, they don't."
What would Miller like people - those who have spent 20 years seeing her face in fashion magazines or in the tabloids - to know about her?
Any.
"I'm less attached to really caring right now," she said.
"I understand that I have a lot more substance than I was allowed to express as a person and than I ever did. And I don't know what to say about that. I mean I'm very happy. I feel very grounded. I have a healthy son, and I'm still working, and I survived a pretty remarkable decade, and a lot of people didn't. So there's kind of a quiet pride in that.
"What would I like people to know?" she added. "I do not know".
