Sienna Miller Talked About Playing A Wife That’s Been Cheated On

Sienna Miller stars in the upcoming Netflix series, Anatomy of a Scandal. She plays the wife of a British politician who’s accused of rape by a colleague he had an affair with. Obviously, Sienna is no stranger to public cheating scandals. Back in 2008 she and Balthazar Getty hooked up while he was married with four kids (he stayed with his wife). But obviously, the iconic Sienna scandal is NannyGate 2005 (not to be confused with NannyGate 2015). Sienna’s then-fiancé, Jude Law, cheated with his kids’ nanny and had to issue a public apology to Sienna. And, in a recent interview with Elle UK, Sienna talked about how she could relate to playing a wife who gets cheated on.

Sienna says, via Elle UK:

…it’s a (painfully) perfect vehicle for Miller, who has also seen her private life become overwhelmingly public. She says the most interesting thing about her character is that, ‘it was familiar terrain, because I’ve experienced some of the things that she experienced. And the feelings were familiar. [But] her way of dealing with what’s thrown at her is the absolute antithesis of what my way is. And so, in a kind of twisted, tourism sense, I just wanted to see how it would feel to react differently. I know that sounds weird,’ she adds, ‘because you’d think it would be deeply unpleasant to sit in that space.’

Did her character also get revenge on her partner by (allegedly) fucking Daniel Craig? I guess we’ll have to tune in to see. Sienna also talked about how intense it was filming the scene where her character’s husband admits to his affair:

‘I had a mic on my chest and there’s a heartbeat that comes in. It was my actual heartbeat being picked up by the monitor, getting faster and faster.’ Unintended it may have been, but it was ultimately (and unsurprisingly) kept in. ‘It made me think, remember and put myself back in that position.’ She laughs. ‘I really must need help, if this is what I enjoy doing!’

Sienna and Jude met while filming the Alfie remake in 2003. At the time he was in the middle of divorcing his first wife, Sadie Frost. They got engaged on Christmas Day 2004, and NannyGate 2005 went down the following summer. The pair attempted to salvage their relationship, but they ended up splitting in November 2006. Three years later it was reported that Sienna and Jude rekindled things while starring in separate Broadway shows that year, but it only lasted until February 2011. After that Sienna dated Tom Sturridge. Those two had a baby together in 2012 and split in 2015. Jude married girlfriend Phillipa Coan in 2019, with whom he recently had his sixth child (he has three kids with his first wife and two others with two ex-girlfriends).

Sienna tells Elle UK that it was weird getting super-famous literally overnight:

‘I was just catapulted into a totally parallel universe,’ she says, ‘while being in love [with Law]. There was a lot of magic at that time. At first, it was kind of comical, but very quickly it became insidious and, yeah, scary. And my boyfriend [at the time] had been experiencing it for years and felt, understandably, a lot of hostility towards that kind of attention. So my initial reaction was the same.’

She adds that being in her twenties and being the subject of tabloid obsession was pretty bonkers:

‘It feels like somebody else’s existence,’ she says, still seeming a little dazed. ‘I can go and visit it and look at it, but it doesn’t feel like my life. I can’t quite believe that it all happened. And not to put it specifically on that one thing, but just the chaos of the entire decade is so far removed from my life now.’

Can Sienna’s next role please be a hot slut homewrecker? Cuz I’m far more interested in what she has to say about that part of her sexual resumé.

Pic: INSTAR