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“I think if I wasn't an actor, I would actually have a pretty successful job as a hairdresser,” Sienna Miller said in a recent call from London. This is not a statement of hubris or exaggeration. The woman whose bohemian waves are seared into the early-aughts imagination would have a line out the door. One imagines naturalistic highlights and rumpled men’s cuts that look as if Mick Jagger just graduated from Central Saint Martins. There would be good tea, an eyeful of vintage, and above all cozy discretion—a commodity valued by someone once harangued by tabloid phone hacking, who sued Rupert Murdoch himself and won. (Right after she mentioned the News Corp founder’s name, the line unexpectedly went dead. Surely a coincidence.)
She played hairstylist to friends in quarantine while holed up in a country place north of Manhattan; like most parents, she also oversaw homeschooling for her 8-year-old daughter, Marlowe, an experience that began as an adventure and wound up in a drone of screen time. The January premiere of her Sundance film Wander Darkly—directed by Tara Miele and newly acquired by Lionsgate for a multi-platform rollout later this year—“honestly feels like a decade ago,” Miller said. In the movie, her character endures a trauma that leaves her in a “disorienting state of limbo, unstuck in time, and witnessing life from a distance,” per the Sundance description, which reads like an eerie prophecy. “I think I speak for the entire planet in saying that that about sums up the experience of 2020,” Miller said with an uneasy laugh. “It feels like a very good moment to be exploring this kind of surreal state, because there's something about the collective experience that is reassuring. We're all in it together.”
The upcoming election is one shared concern for Miller, who has called New York home for the past couple years. For the time being, though, she is finding a reprieve in London, where she’s close to family and will begin filming her upcoming Netflix series, Anatomy of a Murder, next month. If she turns up to set properly aglow, it’ll be thanks in part to a partnership with La Mer, which recently launched a supercharged concentrate, and to a recent facial from Teresa Tarmey. “She had a mask on and a face shield, but we kind of giggled through it,” said Miller. Below, she talks about her skin-care essentials, the resonance of Anatomy, and whether playing Roger Ailes’s wife in The Loudest Voice (and the requisite hours watching Fox News) gives her insight into November’s race.
Vanity Fair: When the pandemic shut things down, were you still in New York or elsewhere?
Sienna Miller: I was in New York. I’d been to a play or something at the beginning of March; I'd been on the subway. A friend of mine had a launch for this bag they were doing—it was for a charity—and I got a call saying that somebody from that party had tested positive. We all had to go into quarantine. I had rented this house upstate from November, just to see what that was like for six months. It was supposed to be a place to go on the weekends, and so my daughter could ride horses and have some form of kind of bucolic life. But it was amazingly fortuitous because we had a place to go.
One of the themes this year has been the complexity of parenthood. What have been the highs and lows for you and for Marlowe?
At the beginning it was strange and it was scary, but we felt quite cozy; it was really cold, I remember, in March. It felt like a kind of perpetual snow day. The homeschooling was something to adapt to, but she was thrilled, and I sort of loved it at the beginning. I just became really domesticated—sort of a 1940s housewife. I wanted to become really autodidactic and learn a language and read every book I had never read, and then I was just baking bread and trying to be a teacher. I didn't get an awful lot done except that. It just became exhausting for her to be on a screen for that long, the patience that's required. She's still young enough to kind of need guidance. I don't know that teaching is a profession for me, but we did our best.
How have these past few months shaped your beauty habits?
I think we all have more time on our hands. I dug out that Clarisonic brush thing. I don't know how old the brush head is; I think it was a decade old, which is pretty revolting! I found the charger in the drawer, so I started using that. It was pretty great, actually. Then I started working with La Mer, so this care package came with the new concentrate and the crème—and if you are exfoliating to the degree that I was with this newfound old brush, and then using this incredible product, my skin actually became clearer than it's ever been, which is strange. But I didn't have an awful lot else to do besides pamper myself in moments.
What about hair management?
Actually I always cut everyone's hair. It's this weird skill that I have. We were quarantined with about eight people, and I became the hairdresser for everybody. I didn't cut my own, but I cut Marlowe's hair, and I did some pretty extreme cuts—a man who [went from] a long, tuck-behind-the-ear hairdo to a full short do. The scissors that I was using were the kitchen scissors, but anyway, it worked.
Did you delve into online fitness?
I had worked with this trainer, Joe Maysonet, when I played a cop in this movie 21 Bridges, and we would occasionally do a Zoom workout. It's really hard to motivate unless I'm actually going somewhere and I'm in a room with someone else. But I did that, and I also did some Sunday morning yoga with this woman, Halle Becker, who's incredible. Marlowe would kind of join in for the shavasana bit at the end. The girls that I was living with would do these 10-minute booty workouts, and we did some Jane Fonda stuff, which was pretty funny. But there was no consistent every single day I'm doing something. We were lucky because we were in the countryside, and so we could go for a walk. I've never been able to be that regimented when it comes to exercise. I try.
When in your life did La Mer first wind up in your hands—as a teen or as a young actress?
My mother always used the crème. It was kind of this pot of gold that lived in her cupboard, and I used to sneak in when I was about 16 and steal it. Then, if I had been a good girl, it would end up in my Christmas stocking. Father Christmas would know that that would be on my wishlist. When I started making films, the makeup artists would ask what products you'd like to use, and—because it wasn't me having to buy it—I would say La Mer. It always felt like this very luxurious treat. I just always noticed that if my skin is stressed out, or I’m shooting and it's a lot of makeup and lights and powder all day, the product really saved me. As I got older, I used the serum and more recently the new concentrate, which has now become an absolutely essential part of my skin care. It's this barrier serum that’s really potent, and if you use it for two weeks, you notice an enormous difference. I just feel like my skin got completely rebuilt, and was very fortunate that it came into my life in this strange time.
What else falls into your daily essentials?
The La Mer lip balm is my favorite lip balm; there's also a lovely kind of lip gloss that is made by [Dr.] Macrene Alexiades that I love. I've got a bit of a lip balm fetish. She also does this product that is for your neck and décolletage, and that's a pretty fantastic thing as well. There is a foaming cleanser by Dr. Nigma [Talib] that really, really works, and she does a great serum. I have these things that I rotate, but I always come back to the La Mer moisturizer, and the eye serum is also incredible—and the new concentrate. Whatever's happened to that [revamped] formula, it’s just leaps and bounds above everything else.
Some of your roles are physically in line with your look; others involve serious transformation. Was there one that was particularly energizing to inhabit?
I tend to look really different in the work that I do; that's something that I deliberately [seek out]. I'm kind of ready to resemble myself in some way, but I did play Elizabeth Ailes, who was married to Roger Ailes, in The Loudest Voice, which was a Showtime limited series I did. It was four hours of prosthetics. I'd never worn prosthetics really at all, but I found it really fascinating and liberating and exciting. The way that they do them these days—it’s seamless. I could look into a mirror and not recognize myself, and what that did was I felt really free to be bold in the choices I made from my physicality, which was also altered with padding and wardrobe. Vocally it was a real transformation, and I just sort of loved the mask of that—irrespective of the hours and hours spent in a makeup chair. But it's always fun to transform. I like to hide in my work.
When I last spoke with you in the middle of 2016, you alluded to the fact that there might soon be a female president. Now in 2020, we are headed into another election. Did that Beth Ailes role give you any insight into political prognostication, or a different relationship to the news?
Out of all the stories to tell at that moment in a pivotal time of the world, and being rampantly left wing as a person, I felt like there was no more fascinating thing to examine than the inception of Fox News, which is really responsible for the election of Donald Trump. I think without Roger Ailes, there would be no Trump. I had to spend a lot of time watching Fox News, which coincided with the Kavanaugh trial, and it's really fascinating to spend time imagining what it is to be on the other side of the political spectrum. If you spend a long time watching Fox, which I had to do, you kind of see how it's so sensationalist and it's so extreme. I do feel like that is an important thing to analyze right now. And just from a personal point of view, I've got my own relationship with the Murdochs and phone hacking and all of that. It's just a world that I—
[The phone disconnects. Miller continues by email.]
If you peel back the curtain on the manipulation that the network capitalizes on, then it might cause people to think twice about what they are being fed. I think, at its best, that’s what the medium of film and television can do. And right now we have to do everything we can to alter the political landscape.
What drew you to the upcoming Anatomy of a Scandal?
It feels like an important and timely story to explore. What is rape, how are women complicit in the unfolding of their lives, how well can anyone know anyone else? It’s deep and raw and is being created by an amazing team of producers and writers, and I’m a huge fan of our director S.J. Clarkson. I’m also excited to be in English in something for once!It feels like an important and timely story to explore. What is rape, how are women complicit in the unfolding of their lives, how well can anyone know anyone else? It’s deep and raw and is being created by an amazing team of producers and writers, and I’m a huge fan of our director S.J. Clarkson. I’m also excited to be in English in something for once!
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