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Two years ago, when Sienna Miller got the scripts “Anatomy of a Scandal”, a very brilliant limited series from David E. Kelley and Melissa James Gibson who read them directly. “I scolded them in such a way that you would want to overdo a six-episode drama,” he said.
She was offered the role of Sophie, the silky wife of James (Rupert Friend), a parliamentary minister. Sophie would need all the skills and talents of Miller – charisma, vulnerability, beauty, wit. And in a career where she’s mostly fallen into supportive wives and girlfriends, Sophie is definitely the leader. Still, Miller hesitated. “I had reservations because it sounded awkward and familiar,” he said.
In the first episode, Sophie learns that James is having an affair with a co-worker; The Daily Mail will broadcast the morning news. For Miller, who survived a scandal in the mid-2000s and was sleeping with the nanny of his then-fiancee Jude Law’s children, resonances were obvious.
But the opportunity to revisit those past experiences in such a way that you might feel compelled to run your fingers over a scar after a wound has healed became part of Miller’s appeal to the role. “I was drawn to explore this from a different perspective, in the weird, twisted way that somehow exists,” she said.
He was at the restaurant of a boutique hotel in Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood on a weekday morning recently, near where Miller lives with his 9-year-old daughter, Marlowe. In “Anatomy of a Scandal” Netflix On Friday, Sophie dresses in plush golds, creams, and taupe. Miller had drawn from the same palette that morning in off-white jeans and a beige sweater, with necklaces overlapping at his throat.
Of course Miller is not Sophie. She is liberal where Sophie is conservative, and expressive where Sophie is restrained. Sophie plays the role of an excellent politician’s wife for very personal reasons. For Miller, role-playing is strictly professional. Her off-camera self is unaffected and open. Yet there are moments in “Anatomy of a Scandal” when Sophie’s life seems inseparable from the actress who played her.
Take, for example, a scene in a late episode where Sophie confronts a not-so-good foe. “I’ve been underestimated and overrated at the same time all my life,” she says. “If I’ve ever traded in the currency the world tells me is mine, that’s how I was trained.” It’s hard to know just who is speaking.
Those parallels aren’t lost on Sarah Vaughan, who created the character of Sophie in the 2018 novel and executive produced the series. “They add an extra nuance and meaning to their performance,” Vaughan said.
Miller deliberately took advantage of his past while filming the series. “There’s some kind of muscle memory involved with most of the experiences I’ve had. So it was pretty good,” he said. Sometimes, it was almost too available.
Speaking on the phone, a friend said that Miller could surrender himself to a character so completely that he could almost seem possessed. “Sienna herself will physically change, she’ll either sweat or tremble or her heart rate will quicken or she’ll have a twitch that she never planned to have,” he 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 loud that it was reflected in her microphone. “The feeling that something is about to emerge that you have absolutely no control over, the anxiety of knowing that you have a nap before something very personal happens becomes so overt, it’s a painful condition,” he said.
And yet Sophie ultimately handles her situation very differently than Miller did. Saying anything more risks spoilers, but Sophie’s approach to discrediting didn’t seem like an option for Miller at the time, and so reinvigorating Sophie’s narrative felt liberating, even therapeutic, he said.
“They all have catharsis,” Miller said. “Every time you go to work and cry, it feels weirdly good.”
Watching Miller in the role, Vaughan noted the purity and apparent honesty of his performance. And something else. “I don’t know if I’m reading this because I know what they’ve been through,” Vaughan said. “But I think there’s anger, but it’s controlled anger.”
When asked where this anger came from, Miller replied, “At this point, at age 40, I had experiences that I had internalized and could use – betrayal and disappointment with how much I had accepted and not pushed back and how I had not pushed back. I had some self-confidence.”
He said it with a smile, but there was also something prickly underneath. At the beginning of the series, Gibson brought a natural complexity to the performances, noting Miller’s ability to simultaneously hold multiple emotional truths (anger, surrender, sarcastic fun).
“He deserves every challenge,” said Gibson, “because he’s ready for it.”
Miller has more self-confidence these days. It took several decades, a dozen roles and the birth of a child, but now he knows who he is, she said. Sophie’s talk about being underestimated and exaggerated continues. He told his opponent, “A lot of people think they know me. Do you think you know me? Believe me, you don’t know.”
What does Miller wish people who looked at him in the fashion magazines or tabloids for 20 years knew about him? Nothing.
“At this point I’m less attached to really caring,” she said. “I realize that as a person I have much more essence than I am allowed to express and that I always do. And I don’t know what to say about it. I mean, I’m very happy. I feel very grounded. I have a healthy child and I’m still working and I’ve had a pretty extraordinary decade and a lot of people haven’t made it. So there’s a kind of quiet pride on that side of it.”
“What would I like people to know?” she loved it. “I don’t.”
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