Two years ago, when Sienna Miller received the scripts for “Anatomy of a Scandal,” a high-gloss limited series from David E. Kelley and Melissa James Gibson, she read them right through. “I binge them the way you would binge a six-part drama,” she said.
She had been given the part of Sophie, the silk lady of James (Rupert Friend), a parliamentary minister. Sophie would need Miller’s full range of skills and gifts – charisma, vulnerability, beauty, humor. And in a career where she’s mostly been relegated to supporting wife and girlfriend slots, Sophie is firmly the protagonist. And yet Miller hesitated. “I had reservations because it felt a bit ugly and familiar,” she said.
In the first episode, Sophie learns that James has been having an affair with a co-worker; The Daily Mail will splash the story in the morning. For Miller, who had endured a scandal in the mid-2000s in which her then-fiance Jude Law slept with his children’s nanny, the resonances were clear.
But just as you might feel compelled to run your fingers over a scar once a wound has healed, the opportunity to relive these past experiences became part of Miller’s appeal to the role. “In the weird, twisted way that somehow exists, I was drawn to explore that from a different perspective,” she said.
This was on a recent weekday morning, at the restaurant of a boutique hotel in Manhattan’s West Village, near where Miller lives with her 9-year-old daughter Marlowe. In “Anatomy of a Scandal”, which comes out on Netflix on Friday, Sophie dresses in plush gold, cream and taupe. Miller had pulled from that same palette that morning, in off-white jeans and a beige sweater, with overlapping necklaces at her neck.
Of course Miller isn’t Sophie. She is liberal where Sophie is conservative, expressive where Sophie is limited. Sophie plays a part, that of the perfect politician’s wife, for very personal reasons. For Miller, role-playing is strictly professional. Her off-camera self is untouched and open. And yet there are moments in “Anatomy of a Scandal” when Sophie’s life seems inextricably linked to the actress who plays her.
Take, for example, a scene in a late episode, where Sophie confronts a not quite opponent. “I’ve been underestimated and overestimated at the same time my whole life,” she says. “If I’ve traded the currency the world told me was mine, well, that’s what I was trained for.” It is difficult to know exactly who is speaking.
These parallels were not lost on Sarah Vaughan, who created the character Sophie in her 2018 novel and is an executive producer on the series. They give “an extra level of nuance and meaning to her performance,” Vaughan said.
When filming the series, Miller also deliberately drew on her past. “There’s a kind of muscle memory about a lot of her experiences that I have. So it was freely available,” she said. Sometimes it was almost too available.
Friend, speaking on the phone, said Miller can surrender herself to a character so completely that she seems practically possessed. “Sienna herself will be physically changed, will be sweating or shaking, or her heart rate will have increased, or she will have a twitch that she could never have planned for,” he said.
When it came time to shoot the scene where Sophie learned of 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 going to come out that you have absolutely no control over, the fear of knowing you’ve had a night’s sleep before something very personal is made extremely public, that’s a painful state,” she said.
And yet Sophie ends up dealing with her situation very differently than Miller did. More to say risks spoilers, but Sophie’s approach to reputational damage didn’t feel like an option for Miller at the time, so playing out Sophie’s story felt liberating, even therapeutic, she said.
“There’s catharsis in all of this,” Miller said. “Every time you go to work and cry, it feels a little weirdly good.”
As she watched Miller in the part, Vaughan noticed the rawness of her performance, the apparent honesty of it. And something else. “I don’t know if I’m reading that because I know what she went through,” Vaughan said. “But I think there’s an anger in it, but a restrained anger.”
When asked where that anger came from, Miller said, “At this point, at age 40, I’ve had experiences that I’ve internalized and can use — betrayal and frustration at how much I just accepted and didn’t push back and how little. self-esteem I had.”
She said this with a smile, but there was also something spiky about it. Gibson, the showrunner, noted that Miller was able to capture more than one emotional truth — anger, resignation, a wry amusement — at once, giving her performances a natural complexity.
“She deserves every challenge,” Gibson said, “because she’s ready.”
Today Miller has more self-esteem. It took a few decades, another dozen roles and the birth of a child, but she knows who she is now, she said. Sophie’s talk about being underrated and overrated goes on and on. She tells her opponent, “A lot of people think they know me. You think you know me. Trust me, you don’t.”
What would Miller wish people—those who have spent 20 years staring at her face in fashion magazines or checkout tabloids—know about her? Nothing.
“I’m less attached to really giving right now,” she said. “I understand that I have much more content than I was allowed to express as a person and always have had. And I don’t know what to say about that. I mean, I’m very happy. I feel very grounded. I have a healthy child and I’m still working, and I’ve survived a pretty extraordinary decade, and a lot of people haven’t. So there’s a kind of quiet pride on that side of it.”
“What do I wish people knew?” she added. “Not me.”
