GRAZIA USA Summer Cover Star

Words by Luke Crisell

Sienna Miller’s front room is the kind of place you could happily while away two hours without realizing any time has passed at all. This morning, the little light that this pale London day has to offer seeps through a large bay window, onto a grand piano. Paintings—the kind collected by someone who seeks out the art that moves them, rather than what an interior designer tells them to buy—are hung thoughtfully on the walls. Two oversize, overstuffed moss-green couches, adorned with colorful cushions, frame a large metal-and-glass coffee table, stacked high with books; a pale rug sits on top of wide, worn floorboards. “There’s pee all over it, look,” says Miller, laughing and pointing out a constellation of yellow stains. One of the culprits, Walter, a wire-haired dachshund, peers up from under a heavy fringe. “He’ll try and hump you. Just wait and see.” Next to Walter is Miller’s five-month-old daughter, bouncing contentedly in a plastic baby jumper. 

“Shall I take her?” asks Oli Green, Miller’s partner, reaching down and lifting his daughter aloft, chair and all. The door closes softly, and Miller tucks her legs up underneath her. She’s wearing white jeans and a cozy Argent sweater in camel cashmere, her hands cupped around a mug of tea. “Well, well,” she says. “It’s been a while since we did this, hasn’t it?”

The first time I interviewed Miller, in 2006, she was 23. Paparazzi attention was so rampant that the hotel where we met had to call in extra security so she could leave safely. The media obsession showed no sign of abating over the subsequent decade, over which we met a few more times. So it’s all the more gratifying to encounter this halcyon version of Sienna Miller, as disarmingly forthright as always.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy and this settled at any point in my life,” she says. “I haven’t done any interviews recently. Having this baby has been the greatest gift in the entire world. I really wanted another child, but I didn’t know I would have one. And she’s just the perfect thing. It’s daunting to imagine having a child, but on their deathbed, very few people will say ‘I regret doing that.’” 

“I think whatever a partnership is, he’s exactly the right medicine for my soul, and vice versa.”

Miller met Green, an actor and model, in 2021 in New York. Green pestered her for a while to go for a drink, and when she eventually agreed, she took her friend Emily Blunt along with her for support. “But she dropped me like a proud parent,” Miller recalls with a laugh. “She said ‘You don’t need me.’ She could feel the sparks.” Miller smiles. “I think whatever a partnership is, he’s exactly the right medicine for my soul, and vice versa.” They moved into this rental house in 2023. (She also has a cottage in the countryside, about an hour outside the city.) For Miller, who was born in New York and owned a house in the West Village but grew up in England, the move home was a long time coming. “I think everyone should live in New York at some point in their life,” she says. “But I’m thrilled to be home and out of that chaos. 

“It felt like the magic, what I fell in love with, had gone,” she says, breaking off a piece of one of the cookies on the table. “New York was like a bad boyfriend I couldn’t keep away from. It can be the most romantic and loving… but it can be so moody. Coming back, being able to let my dogs off the lead and not get yelled at—these are the little things that, in your 40s, you kind of appreciate. And in terms of quality of life, it just feels easier, especially with kids.” Miller’s other daughter, Marlowe, 11, goes to school nearby and the neighborhood, nestled between Holland Park and Kensington Gardens in West London, would be a storybook place to grow up. (J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan flew out of a window in Kensington Gardens to begin his journey to Neverland.) 

“New York was like a bad boyfriend I couldn’t keep away from.”

Miller also has a robust support system in London. Her mother and older sister, Savannah, are here, as is her best friend since primary school, Tori Cook, who has been her publicist from the beginning. Marlowe’s dad, the actor Tom Sturridge, also lives in London, and they both see him regularly. “We’re this funny little blended family,” Miller says. “And now he’s with Alexa Chung, who is a good friend of mine already. And it’s kind of my dream, the way it’s evolved. Everybody loves each other!”

Despite this, she’s not sure London is her forever home. “I’m not good at committing to anything forever,” she says. “I love the idea of a stint in Paris or Rome. I have to keep those options open, or I get itchy feet.” There’s a knock on the door, and Green appears with the baby. “I think she wants you,” he says, laying her down on the couch next to Miller. She doesn’t make a sound. “She’s just happy to be here,” Miller says, looking into her eyes. “Aren’t you, peanut?”

Chung, another of the caryatids of Indie Sleaze, came into the spotlight at a similar time to Miller and for similarly obtuse reasons. “I look back on the chaos of what my life was and I think I’ve been someone that lived very much from experience to experience and not much premeditation,” Miller says, her fingers gently tracing the contours of her daughter’s tiny face. “I had incredible adventures and lots of exciting times, but also real knocks and swings I thought it was just me, being a leaf in the wind, wherever it blew.”

“I feel like I’ve lived 17 lives, and I’ve got a whole other chunk to go.”

As Miller’s fame grew, the tabloid attention increased, culminating in her suing The News of the World for hacking her medical and phone records—one of a series of lawsuits from various well-known people that ultimately led to the paper closing down. “My 30s were intense, too,” she says. “I think my start in adult life was so tainted that it took another decade to kind of release all of that. So much was put on me at a very young age—undeservedly so. I hadn’t had one film come out before I was suddenly very famous. Being given those labels without having a body of work that I was proud of made me feel like, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’” she says. “I can look back on that time as if it’s a different person. In many ways, it doesn’t feel like I went through that experience—maybe I’ve just disassociated from it, for a number of reasons. But also,” she pauses for a moment. “I had a huge amount of fun.” She looks down at her baby. “I mean, isn’t life remarkable? Now that I’m in this completely content place I look back on all of those times with real fondness because I feel like I’ve lived 17 lives, and I’ve got a whole other chunk to go.”

Miller soon built up an impressive body of work. From her start in Guy Ritchie’s Layer Cake, through a series of roles (Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl, Tippi Hedren in The Girl, Taya in American Sniper), to a standout turn as anguished mother Debra in American Woman and more recently Sophie Whitehouse, the wife of a cheating politician in the critically acclaimed Netflix series Anatomy of a Scandal, punctuated by turns on Broadway and in the West End—her career has followed a trajectory all her own. 

“It’s always been the same: I would read something and if I loved it, I would go and do it,” Miller says. “But there wasn’t a lot of strategy in terms of: ‘Is this director capable?’” Today, she finds herself craving parts in films “that people want to actually see. I’ve done so many tiny films that you pour your heart and soul into. It’s such a painful battle without the support of the studio or money. I’m ready to be in things that people actually see—and to have a little bit more fun at work.” 

Enter: Kevin Costner. Horizon: An American Saga is Costner’s passion project, a magnum opus set to play out in four (!) full-length films, the first two of which are coming out in theaters this summer. The films, which tell the story of the settlement of the American West across 15 years, both pre- and post-Civil War, are Costner’s first time directing since 2003, and he’s apparently been writing them since 1988, when Miller was just seven. Miller stars as Frances Ketteridge, protective of child and tight of corset, trying to raise her daughter in the unforgiving American West. For Miller, a child of the ’80s and ’90s who grew up “obsessed” with Costner, the experience has bordered on the surreal. “I got this strange call saying Kevin Costner would like to talk to you and we’re not sure what it’s about. The Zoom starts and…” She puts her hand to her brow, theatrically. “Be still my ’90s heart.” At the end of the call, Costner said: “‘I have one question for you: ‘Will you go west with me, Sienna?’” Miller says. It’s a line so good, so Kevin Costner, it’s hard to believe. “It’s perfect, isn’t it? He sort of thinks in that vernacular. He’s got this childlike, infectious enthusiasm and a genuine humility. Which is astounding, because he’s Kevin Costner. I was like, ‘I will go to fucking Mars with you, Kevin. I would go around the world in 80 days with you.’” 

Costner, an expert of the period, speaks rapturously about Miller’s performance, and presence on set. “Sienna is not only a world-class actress, she was an example for everyone on set,” he wrote in an email. “She’s fearless in how she embraced this role, and the performance will stand forever. Women for me are so important to be recognized in the expansion of the West and often their story is not told. It was a desperately hard journey, and more times than not, was one that they didn’t choose to embark on. It was gritty and dirty and dangerous, but they did it.…. Sienna embodied all of that desperation and spirit in her performance, and her strength, vulnerability and beauty just jump off the screen. I’m forever grateful to her and what she meant to the rest of the cast and crew.”

Miller is due to go back to Utah this fall to make the third film. (“Fingers crossed the first two do well.”) Meanwhile, Costner is personally funding Horizon going to Cannes, a first for Miller. (She has been a judge, but never had a film at the festival.) 

While it would be easy to label this a “new chapter” for Miller, it’s simply where she’s at right now. “At the beginning of this year,” she says, “I woke up and felt like, ‘What do I have to do to get to the point where I’m on that list to work with the directors that I want to work with?’ And, regrettably, unless you have a tiny film that breaks through and wins awards or you have huge box office numbers behind you, it’s really difficult to be in their minds.” She lists Martin Scorsese, Yorgos Lanthimos, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Greta Gerwig among the directors that she wants to work with “before I die.”

Like most of us, Miller relies on close friends to help her make big career decisions—but hers happen to be Emily Blunt, Scarlett Johansson, and Jennifer Lawrence. “Those are my three best girlfriends in the industry,” she says. “They’re like three sisters, and they’re the most successful women in Hollywood. I can run stuff by them and they’ll be like, ‘No fucking way.’ I was talking to Jen [Lawrence] the other day and something came up and I was like ‘I want to do that! I’ll read [for the part],’ and she was like, ‘You do not even offer that. Absolutely fucking not.’” These friendships have allowed Miller to more easily see herself as the accomplished actress she is. “Ultimately what I’m trying to do comes from a place of trying to develop the self-esteem I was lacking for a long time by valuing myself in the way that I want to be valued in my work,” she says. “So I’m saying no to an awful lot of things in the hope that that will give me the confidence to be more assertive about chasing the things that I really want to do.”

This determination might seem newfound, but Miller has always been outspoken about the lack of equity in Hollywood, particularly when it comes to pay. Throughout her career, Miller—like so many women in her industry—has faced enormous pay disparity, and the acute lack of fairness is not lost on her. “We’re dealing with an industry where we’re all paid stupid amounts of money, so it’s difficult to talk about it sensitively,” she says. “But I’ve worked with so many male movie stars who have been really happy for me at the salary I got, whilst getting maybe 90 times more than I was. For American Sniper, for example, I got paid less than what one TV [advertising] spot would cost the studio and my name is above the title in what became the highest grossing R-rated film of all time.”

Today, she’s acutely aware of her own worth and clearly, rightly, has very strong opinions on this subject. “It’s a scandal, honestly,” she says. “The most frustrating part, in retrospect, is my response to it all. It was gratitude versus having enough self-worth to say: ‘Actually, this is bullshit. I deserve way more. And if that’s what you’re offering, I don’t want it. Fuck you.’” Now though, Miller is firm. “I was willing to accept it,” she says. “But Hollywood doesn’t respect that kind of behavior. You have to be a bit of an asshole. And now, because it’s been so exposed, people are very scared of fucking up. It’s really nice to see the people in power in Hollywood making these decisions being on the back foot. They’re terrified of their own misogyny being exposed and I feel much more emboldened to point a finger and say ‘no.’”

For a moment it seems as though her baby might actually make a noise, but no. (“It’s weird! I actually Googled ‘Is it alright if babies don’t cry?’ the other day.”) Miller is very much taking her second child in stride: Last year, she proudly showed her baby bump on a Vogue World red carpet in a Schiaparelli two-piece. “That kind of ownership of oneself is a different generation, in a way,” she says. “Growing up in the world that I grew up in, everything was so criticized and judged that it’s an adjustment to get to a place where you can be in charge of your own narrative and celebrate what’s happening to your body in a way that isn’t torn apart. I tread carefully because of the experience I had but, actually, Rihanna ran so we could walk. Why would we be encouraged to hide that? No! It’s the most extraordinary thing. And I thought—aren’t the photos [last year, she was photographed by Annie Liebowitz for American Vogue at 28 weeks] incredible things for her to have?”

It’s naptime for the baby, and while Miller would be happy to keep talking, she has to pack: In a few days, she and Green are headed to the Met Gala in New York. She gathers her baby daughter in her arms and she walks me to the front door “You know, the narrative around me has been one of resilience and ‘wasn’t it hard?’ But I don’t look back on my life that way,” she says, rocking her daughter slightly from side to side. “I don’t see my life as this hard thing. I look at it as incredibly fun and rich and textured and scary but, honestly, I don’t know that I’d have it any other way.”

Words by Luke Crisell, Photography by Jem Mitchell, Styling by J. Errico

Set Design by Amy Friend at Lalaland Artists, Styling Assistance by Delaney Williams & Katy Jarvis

Read GRAZIA USA’s Summer Issue featuring cover star Sienna Miller: