Sienna Miller covers the December issue of British Vogue, and she’s one of several cover stars. Sienna is promoting some specific projects – her successful turn in Anatomy of a Scandal (a much-watched Netflix series) and Apple’s upcoming futuristic drama, Extrapolations, which is about climate change and whales. The most interesting part of this interview is when she gets into the nitty-gritty of her (now settled) lawsuit against The Sun and how she was screwed over so thoroughly by the British tabloid media for years. Some highlights:

The Sun reporting, in 2005, that she was pregnant: Her choice not to continue with the pregnancy was, she tells me, “in many ways impacted by that behaviour”. In the aftermath, “People on the street would shout ‘baby killer’ at me. That’s fine. That’s their opinion. You know, there’s always going to be people like that.”

Suing The Sun, settling out of court even though she would have loved a trial: “I would love to not have to tell the f**king world that I had an abortion that I didn’t want. But the fact is, all of that is out there anyway, what can I do with it? I can walk away or sweep it under the carpet or I can advocate for some form of justice, not necessarily only for me, because in many ways it’s so in the past and life has really moved on, but for people who don’t have that kind of outreach.”

She was disappointed in the reaction to her defiant, angry speech after she settled: “I thought that this was going to be a bomb, because it was very direct.” That said, journalists have been in touch, both anonymously with “intel” to help her case and also to apologise for their treatment of her. Some she has met. But it’s still “really upsetting to step back”, she admits. Recently, she took part in an investigative documentary about the phone hacking scandal in which she “got interviewed intimately for three hours and shown articles and, you know, I cried, which I just would never want to do. It’s part of the fabric of what I am today, for sure. Which is actually an extraordinary addition to the substance of a person.”

Her reaction at the time the media was spying on her: “A couple of years of absolutely chaotic behaviour. I did not know which way was up or down. I was, I suppose, in the midst of an absolute breakdown on every single level.” Back then, she “couldn’t say what had actually happened. My way of dealing with that was to slightly lose it. And I did, I was running around the Vanity Fair party with no shoes on and getting really pissed. I don’t judge it, necessarily… There are some things I regret, because I wish I’d been more protected. But life was so out of control. It’s a miracle that I actually retained a career and a life.”

She was “offered less than half” a male costar’s salary on a Broadway play: “I said to the producer, who was extremely powerful, it’s not about money – it’s about fairness and respect, thinking they’d come back and say, ‘Of course, of course.’ But they didn’t. They just said, ‘Well f**k off then,’” she snorts. (The play happened, but she won’t name it – “I don’t want to be mean.”)

She loved Chadwick Boseman: The late actor Chadwick Boseman reallocated some of his salary so Miller’s fee could be met for their 2019 film 21 Bridges, on which Boseman was also a producer. Afterwards, she told him, “‘What you did was extraordinary and meant the world.’ He came up to me when we wrapped and said, ‘You got paid what you deserved.’”

She’s impressed by how things have changed. Actors who are “10 years younger have the word ‘no’ in their language in a way that I didn’t. [Now] if you say, ‘I don’t feel comfortable’ in front of any form of executive, they’re sh-tting their pants. You’re included in a conversation about your level of comfort. It’s changed everything.”

Her 30s: “My thirties were hard. Really hard. There was a lot of anxiety. Relationships hadn’t worked out – I imagined that I would be married with three kids, being a great mum. I love being a mother… I’d invested what felt like the important years in something that was just a bucket with a hole in it of a person. I wasted time. And I felt like time was really my currency.” She’s quick to point out she is not referring to Tom Sturridge, Marlowe’s father and her “best friend”.

She’s currently seeing model Oli Green, 15 years her junior: “There’s a misogyny that is ingrained in men of my age and older that I don’t see in [the] generation below.”

She plans to move back to the UK soon. New York is “unravelling”, she says. Besides, she misses the British “irreverence, the humour, laughing with a cabbie, a good bloody pub”.

She’s feeling herself at 40: “When I got to 40, it was like coming out of a clearing.I felt so excited. As a young woman I was so trivialised and so insubstantial-seeming, but there’s very little that anyone can say to a 40-year-old woman. And I also don’t give a f**k. It was such a headline in my life – what people thought of me. It was so loud that I believed it. Now I’ve got to a point where it’s absolutely none of your business. I will do my job. I will be a pleasure to work with. I will raise my girl. And I will live my life.”

[From British Vogue]

One, I bet the Broadway producer was Scott Rudin. Two, she always tells that Chadwick Boseman story and it’s lovely. So many actors have similar stories about him, how gracious he was, how he stood up for his coworkers and for women. Three, is New York unraveling? Perhaps, but from where I sit, the UK seems to be unraveling too, maybe even more than NYC?

I appreciate her honesty about her “rough” 30s, wasting time in a nowhere relationship with the wrong guy, feeling like she wasn’t living the life she was supposed to be living. I appreciate her honesty about how out-of-control everything felt in her 20s too, how she went a bit “mad” for a while, how much she cared what people thought.

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Cover & IG courtesy of British Vogue.