As I said a few weeks ago, I’m not really feeling The Whitewashing of Sienna Miller. It feels like she’s really pushing that narrative: now that she’s 35 years old and a single mother, people should take her more seriously. While I like that she’s “grown up” enough where she’s not falling out of nightclubs and having torrid affairs with married men, it seems like we’re setting the bar too low? Sienna is still Sienna. She still loves drama. She’s still fundamentally a narcissist. I was reminded of that again as I read Sienna’s recent profile in The Guardian. She’s promoting The Lost City of Z and basically shilling for more work now that she’s a Serious Actress and no longer an It Girl. Some highlights:

She likes taking small parts in classy films: “Well, it’s suited me since I had Marlowe to do these parts with these great film-makers, because this took a month, American Sniper was three, Foxcatcher was three weeks. I can, kind of, pop up in these classy things. I do feel frustrated sometimes by the fact that I want to get those roles. I watch films and I know how I’d do it and I want the opportunity. But at the same time you have to strategise in ways that, I don’t know, that I just haven’t done.” What would that involve? “Oh, shmoozing and doing something to get foreign value. Foreign value. Numbers. You know, someone like Jennifer Lawrence has foreign value. She can get anything financed, she has foreign value for sure.”

How would she get foreign value? “I would probably be the lead in a Marvel film. I’m not averse to doing something like that. I’m not saying that at all. But in order to get to be the star of a film of that sort, for people to bank on you in that way, you need numbers. I can’t get a film financed in the way that you would need to. It’s all about numbers. Which is absolute bollocks, because you can have two movie stars in something and if the film’s crap it can make nothing. The whole way that the industry is set up is numbers, and it doesn’t add up, they’re terrible at the numbers. But I’m not frustrated. I feel quite content.”

Her early days: “I think, from a really young age, I had a real confidence. I had no doubt in my mind that’s what I would do. I wanted to be, like, in my own mind I was like Meryl Streep. I hadn’t given it much thought, like most things, but it’s like, that was my job, that’s what I wanted to do, and there was never any doubt in my mind. It’s actually a really interesting lesson in how much your own confidence and belief can influence things. You see it with Donald Trump. Not that I was like him. I mean, obviously, that’s a really sinister example. But you can absolutely manipulate the situation if you do not allow for doubt within it. I went into every audition believing that I could get this, and there was something about that confidence – people were like: ‘Oh!’ – that I think was disarming.”

Now her confidence has been whittled away: “I don’t know, I think life just sort of happened in quite a full-on way, and I just learned through experience to just become … you know, I just lost some of that innocence and positivity, which is growing up, which is getting older, which happens… I’m just more realistic now. It used to be that everyone was lovely and everything was great and I was so positive and I just couldn’t wait to live and experience. Now I’m a bit older, and a bit more tired all the time.”

Whether she “internalizes the shame” of being called a homewrecker: “Of course, yes. Yes, totally because it was everywhere or I felt like it was. It was very personal, and then you sort of think, well, is that who I am? Then you get older and you’re like, oh, f–k that.”

Giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry: “I feel more powerful, definitely. It changed the terms. But then I also feel like if anyone wrote anything now it would not bother me. I don’t feel like I could get the shame. I have enough of a sense of my own self and my own life and who I actually am. I don’t think I really did back then, because I don’t think you do when you’re that age, and so I just – it was just an assault, I just felt like I was being blasted with personalities that just perpetuated the behaviour that they wanted to perpetuate. It was a strange experience. But nowadays I feel relatively immune to that kind of bitchy criticism. I don’t feel like I am interesting enough now to be focused on in the way that I was. I don’t want to go out to a pub every night and get pissed. I don’t want that drama.”

She wants more kids but is incapable of planning ahead: “I’d like an army of them” – but laughs that she has always been hopeless at making plans. “You can’t change who you are. I’ll always be the same person. I just grew up a little bit, got pregnant and had a kid.”

[From The Guardian]

“I just grew up a little bit, got pregnant and had a kid” is probably the most honest thing in this interview. That’s sort of why I’m not buying her whitewashing – because it seems like she just got a little bit older and had a kid and now we’re supposed to believe that she’s so different. At first I was ready to roll my eyes at the Meryl Streep line, but I understood what she was saying in context – she had the confidence, perhaps the arrogance, to believe that she was incapable of failing and that confidence helped her a lot in her early days.

Photos courtesy of WENN.