So, I say, this people-pleaser thing, we’re on to something now. “Yes,
doctor.” And did she adopt it as a tactic? “No, it came more from
insecurity.” Where did that come from? “Oh God, I haven’t thought about this
for years, but I think probably if you have parents who split up [she was
six], you want to please them to get the love, not that I didn’t feel loved,
but my father remarried [Kelly Hoppen, the designer] and it was quite hard
at times. And if I was being really analytical, going to boarding school
really young [she was eight], you overcompensate to get love back.”
Mostly, however, she feels, “it’s who I am. My mother’s the same. I’ve always
felt the need to look after people and to make people feel nice and warm...
at the expense sometimes of my own happiness, my own wellbeing.” As a
teenager she went through a rebellious phase, “but my wildness was always
inclusive of those around me”.
Her father, Ed Miller, is an American, her mother, Jo, part South African.
Although born in New York, Miller grew up in Parsons Green, southwest
London, and feels thoroughly English. Seems it too, with her ten Marlboro
Lights a day and “going to the pub for a few beers” and “I joined a gym once
but it was mind-numbingly boring”. Her father, a banker, an art dealer, “a
genius IQ, good with numbers” has remarried three times. He lived nearby
when she was a child and is now in the Caribbean. Her mother has not
remarried. Miller sees her every week.
So she grew up in a female environment, at home and school, well off, liberal
within limits, creative. “We were always encouraged to talk about stuff.
There wasn’t any of this stiff upper lip. If you felt like crying, you could
cry.” She doesn’t get depressed, doesn’t get angry much – “I do get
emotional but I don’t throw things or punch walls. If something bothers me,
I’ll talk about it, have a good cry than put it to bed. I don’t carry much
stuff.”
Her mother worked for David Bowie for a while in the Seventies but it’s not
true, she says, that they spent summer holidays at Elton John’s place in
France. Rather, it was weekends on a farm in the West Country, where “my
godmother lived in the big house and there were three cottages on the land”.
Horses were present. “That scar is a horse kick,” she says, pointing to her
temple. She “is a huge fan of the English countryside” and is looking for a
home there. In ten years, she says, she’d like “to be living in the country,
probably have kids, maybe working a bit less than I have been”.
She did well at school (the ultra-smart Heathfield St Mary’s in Ascot),
sitting English, history and theatre studies at A level, for which she got
two As and a B. “I wasn’t top of my class but I didn’t struggle.” She was
sporty: lacrosse, tennis, netball. “I didn’t feel like the most beautiful, I
was quite funny-looking. I wasn’t the most popular. I was in the cool group,
the naughty, fun, confident group, the group who would sneak out for fags,
but we weren’t bad.” University was an option. “I almost went but I knew
what I wanted to do and I felt there was this system, especially if you’ve
been to private school: you leave, you take a gap year, you go to
university, you get a job in London, you get married, you have kids, this
life was mapped out. I wanted to carve out my own life.”
She went to acting school in New York, came back, did some television, got
roles in Layer Cake and Alfie and “fell in love with someone very famous”,
thus becoming famous herself before she’d done very much. If she could do
her job and not be famous, she says, “that would be heaven”. Seriously?
“Seriously.” Did she never set out to court the press? “No, never, never,
ever. I mean: no!”
She’s upper middle class, but doesn’t particularly look or sound it. Her face
has a blank, malleable quality, which should help as her career develops. On
camera she can look like Julie Christie one minute, Denise Van Outen the
next, posh to prole, gaunt to voluptuous, in an instant. She’s 5ft 6in and,
“I eat what I want and I probably could be a bit fitter and less wobbly in
certain areas.” She doesn’t exercise, although that will have to change now
she’s signed to play the lead baddy in GI Joe, “a Marvin
[sic] comic action film”, the first part of a trilogy if things go well. Has
she got special powers? “No! Oh God, bollocks! I’d love a special power. But
she’s good with a gun. I spoke to the stunt co-ordinator, trying to sound
professional, to ask him, ‘Is there anything I should be doing?’ And he’s
like, ‘Just do some cardio.’ I had no idea what he meant.” She would always,
she says, “be happier eating and being a bit podgy than not eating and being
thin”.
Sitting there in her skinny black jeans and black cardie, she’s a way to go
before the word podgy might be brought into play. Her boots, incidentally,
are Miu Miu. Anything from her own label? (She started one, with her sister,
Savannah, a designer, last year.) “No. That’s not good. I should have worn
something.”
Sienna? Savannah? It’s often written she had a hippy childhood but “that’s
been overplayed”. Indeed, in many respects she’s quite the traditionalist.
She thinks feminism “paved the way for the open society we live in now,
where women can do what they want”, but equally that “women’s instincts were
denied a lot by that movement. I know lots of women in their forties who
have had successful careers but are miserable because they denied the
instinct of having children. I love staying home and cooking... it’s a
feminine desire to create a home and a nest. It makes me happy looking after
people. I’m not sitting darning socks but there are feminine instincts I
don’t ignore and I’m glad that I don’t.”
That said, she gets steamed up about the “stud or slag” double standards
applied to male and female sexuality. I say, well, you’re allowed to be a
party girl up to a point. She interrupts. “I’m not even a party girl. Party
girls are girls who go to parties. I don’t unless it’s something to do with
a film. If you’re an actress and you’re not in a relationship and you’re in
the public eye, it’s a terrible state of affairs. I’m in a relationship now
but when I wasn’t I was linked to everybody I was in the same room with.”
I get out my notebook and we go through the list. Will Carter? “Who’s he?” An
actor, I think, I don’t really know. “Oh yeah.” P. Diddy? Josh Hartnett?
James Franco? Jamie Burke, you did go out with him, didn’t you? “Yep.”
Matthew Rhys? Isaac Ferry? Calum Best? Hayden Christensen? Leonardo
DiCaprio? Daniel Craig? Orlando Bloom? “They’re people I’ve worked with or
know.” Peter Phillips? “Peter Phillips? Isn’t he whatshisname? The royal?”
He’s Princess Anne’s son, I say. “Well, there’s my point proved. I don’t
think I’ve even met all these people. Apparently for the affair I was having
with Sean Bean, whom I’ve never met, I was cooking him my famous beef stew,
which I’ve never made.” The media, she says, “invent a personality and the
reality is completely different but wouldn’t sell nearly as many papers”.
What is the reality? “That I’m actually quite a normal 26-year-old and I
choose to live a normal life and that makes me more vulnerable.” She walks
her dogs (“My mum had cats but they didn’t much like me, being a
people-pleaser – I want tons of affection back”) in Regent’s Park, reads,
cooks, sees her mates, women she’s known since they were girls, plus Keira
Knightley and Sean Penn, nips across to Robert Redford’s Sundance Festival,
off to LA for three months, then Prague for another month to star in a $170
million movie, normal stuff like that. As normal as can be when you’re hot
property, hot property with a photographer camped permanently outside your
house.
A house, incidentally, at the Marylebone end of St John’s Wood, northwest
London, and one she now shares, I can reveal, with actor Rhys Ifans (Notting
Hill, Peter Cook in Not Only… But Always). But the story in that week’s
Grazia, that she had proposed to him, is, she says, “absolute rubbish”.
Ifans, however, does call during the interview. “Hi, bubble,” she says.
“Yep, I’ll see you in a bit.”
She hangs up. “I’m having a chicken pie when I get home, there’s your big
scoop.” Thanks very much, I say. Pause. “Now I’ve revealed I’m a
people-pleaser so massively!” she wails. “Sorry! Please like me!” Don’t
worry, I say, it’ll be fine. “Next one we’ll do in the pub,” she promises,
“get a bit pissed and you can have all the scoops you need.” I say I’m
looking forward to it, and I am.
Sienna Miller is nominated for the Orange Rising Star Award, to be presented
at the Bafta Awards on February 10, alongside Ellen Page, Sam Riley, Shia
LaBeouf and Tang Wei. To vote, visit www.orange.co.uk/bafta
