Sienna: ‘I Was Pigeonholed As Someone’s Fashionable Girlfriend’

The enduring icon on countering people’s preconceptions of her.

Sienna Miller just complimented my cowboy boots. They’re years-old Mango, could pass for Ganni, if you squint. ‘Next time say they’re vintage,’ she winks. It’s late morning and we’re tucked away in a quiet corner of a members’ club in Fitzrovia. Naturally, Miller’s own get-up outshines every designer ensemble in the building – the lace of a snow-white Carolina Herrera slip dress just visible beneath a classic Burberry trench, and a weighty mixed-metal necklace by Paris-based jewellery designer Gabrielle Greiss delivers Miller’s signature bohemian flair. ‘I love how whimsical it looks,’ she says, tinkering with the large silver moon at its centre.

The bastion of noughties boho chic, Miller was an influencer before influencers were a thing. She compelled Millennials en masse to tuck ripped jeans into Ugg boots, button suede waistcoats over broderie blouses and hunt down embellished belts like their lives depended on it. I ask her whether she was a cool girl at school. ‘Yeah,’ she says, smiling wryly, ‘I was always quite precocious, a little naughty.’

Born in New York and raised in London, Miller’s parents (Edwin, an American banker, and Josephine, a former model from England) split when she was six. When Miller’s father remarried, he unwittingly flicked the switch on his daughter’s hallowed style evolution. ‘I inherited a stepsister,’ Miller tells me, ‘and his new wife used to put us in identical clothes – I had this visceral reaction to it all and started going quite off piste with my fashion choices.’ It’s the first time Miller has drawn the connection. ‘I’m only realising the impact it had as I talk through it now,’ she muses. ‘It became important for me to assert my identity – I’d wear a red shoe with a green shoe, I was pretty whacky with my styling back then.’ A boarding school cool kid, yes, but Miller wasn’t a mean girl. ‘I was quite out there and individual, but in a grungy, naughty, smoking fags sort of way. I wasn’t like Regina George.’

We’re meeting to discuss Miller’s latest beauty campaign – she’s the new face of Schwarzkopf Crème Supreme, and it is little wonder. ‘She’s got the best hair in the business,’ hair legend Sam McKnight tells me. ‘Its natural movement is unreal,’ says hairstylist to the stars Larry King. Miller works regularly with both and is less lofty in her own assessment. ‘It’s a bit horsey,’ she says, scrunching up her nose. ‘My boyfriend [actor Oli Green] likened it to a horse tail the other day – I think he meant it was thick, you know, but I thought, “Great, excuse me while I go and do a hair mask.”’

The pair, who first met at a Halloween party (Miller dressed as David Bowie), have been together since 2021. They welcomed a daughter in 2024 (sister to 13-year-old Marlowe, who Miller co-parents with Tom Sturridge) and last year sent a wall of photographers into a frenzy when, side by side, they mic dropped Miller’s baby bump beneath a sheer Givenchy gown at the Fashion Awards.

Midway through her pregnancy when we speak, Miller confesses she’s tired but excited and going through a lot of peanut butter and jam on toast. ‘That’s not my craving, though – I’m hooked on vinegary things at the moment,’ she says, before going on to lament another round of post-partum hair loss. ‘It’s these bits,’ she says, twirling a few wispy blonde baby hairs around her fingers. ‘They’re just starting to grow back properly and now it’s all going to go again.’

Miller moved back to London in 2023 after a seven-year stint in New York. Her ideal day off, she says, involves breakfast in bed then strolling aimlessly around the city. Or retreating to somewhere more bucolic. ‘I’d love to be in the countryside, in front of the fire with a glass of red wine.’

Despite growing up with a model-turned-yoga-teacher mother, Miller says she is far from a wellness fanatic – the kind of clean girl, Reformer-Pilates princess aesthetic sweeping social media. ‘That’s the person I aspire to be,’ she laughs. ‘But if I have a 5am pick-up, I’m not going to get up at 4.15 to do a workout and stir collagen into a cup of tea. I’m going to set my alarm for 4.55, brush my teeth and go.’

One would hope the early pick-ups let up this year as Miller takes her foot off the gas to enjoy some maternity leave. She has form for powering through, though (she was breastfeeding Marlowe when she filmed Foxcatcher in 2012), and has projects to promote in 2026, including the Jack Ryan movie with John Krasinski, out at the end of May, and Madden, a 1970s NFL biopic, which sees Miller star as the peroxide blonde Carol Davies, wife of legendary Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis (Christian Bale), which lands in November. ‘David O Russell directed it and his films are fully fledged hair stories. I get to wear the most incredible wigs, oh my gosh. I mean, really bleached out, nuts!’ she enthuses.

Make-up trailer transformations have always been integral to Miller’s process. ‘I love playing with looks,’ she says. She famously cut off her prized blonde waves to play Edie Sedgwick in the 2006 hit Factory Girl. ‘It helped me channel Edie, I felt like her – hair has a huge impact on how I feel and present as an actor.’

Miller’s rise to A-list status was stratospheric but, to her chagrin, her notoriety had far more to do with her private life than her talent. She trained at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York and was signed by her agent, Dallas Smith, soon after graduating. At 21, she landed two lifechanging roles in Layer Cake and Alfie. A high-profile romance with her Alfie co-star Jude Law followed, and the pair were crowned the golden couple of the late noughties. Life threw Miller to the paparazzi wolves.

‘There were these preconceptions about who I was because of the way that I became famous very quickly, very young, and those preconceptions were much more powerful than anything that I could manifest or create artistically,’ she says. ‘I was pigeonholed as someone’s fashionable girlfriend and I was capable of so much more than that – there was a much more violent lens shining on women back then.’

The balance was off in the movie industry, too. ‘I remember being 21 and auditioning to be the love interest of a 45-year-old man,’ says Miller. ‘Things have moved on since then, but the idea of an older woman with a younger man, for example, is still fetishised rather than normalised – there’s a disparity there that I would love to see disappear.’

Happily, she has witnessed a shift on a bigger scale. ‘I think the whole world is embracing women as they age in a way that is unprecedented,’ says Miller. ‘I’m thinking of Dame Maggie Smith in that Loewe campaign, Charlotte Rampling for Givenchy and Massimo Dutti, we’re celebrating ageing in a way that we’ve never done before – you were kind of obsolete at 30 and that’s absolutely not the case any more.’

So what does 2026 hold for Miller? ‘I’m looking forward to taking some time off, being with my kids more consistently and surrendering to how random life is,’ she says, smiling. ‘That’s something that I’m much more curious about as I get older – I have a much clearer understanding of how quickly life goes. I’ve always tried to fill my life with as much diversity as possible, and it’s never been boring, so I’m excited to buckle up and continue whatever journey comes my way – the highs, the lows and everything in-between.’

All images by Simon Emmett

Via: Grazia