Sienna Miller’s role in new Netflix drama recalls Jude Law cheating scandal

Sienna Miller’s role as a cheated-on politician’s wife in Netflix drama Anatomy of a Scandal is uncomfortably close to home, mirroring her real-life public betrayal by fiance Jude Law.

Sienna Miller and Rupert Friend in Anatomy of a Scandal

Sienna Miller was filming a crucial scene for her latest drama, Anatomy of a Scandal, when, without warning, her heart started to thump. For Miller, the scene – in which her politician husband (played by Rupert Friend) reveals his extra-marital affair is about to become headline news – had uncomfortable parallels with a real-life public betrayal she had endured years before.

The American-British actor says of that charged moment during filming: “I had this microphone on when Rupert breaks the news that the story’s about to come out … My heartbeat started to accelerate and became very loud. They were picking it up on the monitor and actually you could hear it.” Anatomy of a Scandal director SJ Clarkson later used the actor’s rapid heartbeats “as a motif throughout the show”, says Miller, sounding curiously detached about her unexpected physiological reaction being used as a kind of soundtrack of distress.

In 2005, Miller – then reductively defined as a posh “It Girl” known more for her boyfriends and fashion sense than her acting roles – found herself in the same position as her latest screen character, cheated-on political wife Sophie Whitehouse. Her fiance, British actor and heartthrob Jude Law, publicly admitted having an affair with his children’s nanny and amid unrelenting tabloid attention, Miller broke off the engagement. (Miller and Law had met when they starred in the film Alfie – Law played a sex addict and Miller his unstable girlfriend.)

At the time of Law’s betrayal, Miller was 23 and appearing in a London production of As You Like It alongside Dominic West. She has spoken previously about how, despite “that level of public heartbreak, to have to get out of a bed, let alone stand in front of 800 people every night, it’s just the last thing you want to do”.

When I ask her whether she drew on that emotional crisis for her Anatomy of a Scandal role, she replies with unruffled candour: “Public betrayal is something that I’ve experienced, which is something many women have experienced in many walks of life. The public aspect of it … The idea of something coming out that you don’t want to come out, was a familiar feeling and not a nice one.”

The American Sniper and 21 Bridges star is now 40, and she admits “I kind of question why I wanted to put myself back into that position or that scenario (in Anatomy of a Scandal). It made me really nervous, that scene … So, of course, there is some triggering in a way that I find, in quite a twisted sense, quite interesting.” There’s that cool British detachment and searching sense of self-scrutiny again.

Despite feeling triggered, the former model and Golden Globe nominee says: “I’m glad I was a part of this show. All of that feels like another lifetime, it’s so long ago, and I understand that there are parallels that people will inevitably draw, but I didn’t feel like I was sitting there aged 23.”

Developed by television legends David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, Big Little Lies) and Melissa James Gibson (House of Cards, The Americans) and co-executive produced by Australian powerhouse Bruna Papandrea, Anatomy of a Scandal is a part psychological thriller, part courtroom drama that launched on Netflix yesterday and explores the hot-button issues of power, privilege and sexual consent.

Miller’s Sophie Whitehouse is a stay-at-home mother with a charmed life – from her (largely unused) Oxford education to her live-in nanny and the brass nameplate on the door of the large, elegant London home she shares with her children and husband, James. James is a rising political star for the Conservative Party. Also an Oxford graduate, he is charismatic, handsome, a committed father and a close friend of the prime minister.

Sophie’s life implodes, however, when James’s lover, a young parliamentary aide (Naomi Scott), alleges that he raped her in a lift at the House of Commons. James says the encounter was consensual and that the rape allegation is “absurd”.

Nonetheless, he is charged with rape and a steely QC, Kate Woodcroft, played by Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery, is determined to put him behind bars. (In a sensational twist, we eventually learn that Woodcroft is carrying more undeclared baggage than an A380.)

For Sophie, her husband’s trial sparks a reckoning about her marriage and her role in buying into a certain kind of privilege in which the powerful expect to get away with things others would not. “What is really interesting,” says Miller, is the “sense of entitlement and the idea that there is one set of rules for the people who are in power at the moment and another for the rest of the country, and that’s something that’s really angered a lot of people in England.” (She is referring to the “party-gate” scandal in which members of the Johnson government allegedly flouted their own pandemic restrictions.)

Sienna Miller attends the 2022 Vanity Fair Oscar Party. Picture: Getty Images

Anatomy of a Scandal co-executive producer Liza Chasin says political and corporate sex scandals offer “a ripe arena to tell a story … although this is not a true story, there are so many true stories that people can point to that are, sadly, too similar”. She says Miller’s performance as a betrayed spouse is “spectacular. She drew so much from personal experience of deceit in her own relationship and having to come to terms with that – I think she really connected to the character in a deep way.”

For this interview Miller, who is based in the US, is sitting in a basement kitchen with a huge stone fireplace streaked with black. She has a heavy cold – her nose is blocked, her voice cracks, she is sniffing – but she ploughs on, giving frank and thoughtful answers to most questions. She’s dressed in a grey sweatshirt, without makeup and her hair pulled back casually, yet her delicate beauty is still obvious. She has a refined British accent not too far removed from that of Sophie Whitehouse.

She has played some big personalities in recent years, including a compelling turn as a volatile, working-class grandmother whose daughter goes missing in the 2018 film American Woman. Critics including the Los Angeles Times’ Kimber Myers hailed her performance, with Myers writing: “We’ve seen dramas led by brash women before; the one here is played by Sienna Miller, displaying more rage and range in a single film than some actresses get to show in their whole careers.’’

Her portrayal of Sophie is, in stark contrast, all about the power of restraint. “She has that contained thing that’s very specifically English that I don’t have,’’ Miller says. “She has a line where she says: ‘I was brought up to control my emotions’, and I think that’s very much part of a certain type of English woman and I really wanted to explore that kind of reserved quality.

“She’s quite acerbic. She’s definitely tough, but the reserve is a kind of upper-class English behaviour that I have never done before. Therefore, I felt like when the cracks started to show, it would be more impactful if she was somebody that was more contained … I wanted to make sure that who she was at the end was very, very different to who she was at the beginning. I do think that there is a kind of openness that comes throughout the show that SJ and I worked really hard to find.”

Adapted from a best-selling novel by British writer Sarah Vaughan, the show deals with another issue that could have been cribbed from the headlines: sexual consent. Miller says of this: “James Whitehouse at the end of this (drama) still believes that he is innocent of what he is accused of, and that’s a very interesting psychology to explore, or a very interesting sickness in our culture.” She reflects that her on-screen husband “is unaware of his flaws, in that specific way. He was raised in a way that he was told that the world was his and it was there for the taking.

Jude Law and Sienna Miller in 2005. Picture: Getty Images

“There was so much low-hanging fruit – you could have sensationalised this story very easily with stereotypes – and what is complex about it, particularly with the tone SJ has struck, is that she avoids those stereotypes. Therefore, I think it will be polarising.”

Homeland star Friend does not come across as a one-dimensional creep, and in terms of the rape allegation, “I think there will be people who are kind of on his side,” says Miller. The fact James is “a good father and a good politician and a good husband … makes it much more interesting psychologically than it might have been, had they gone for the villain”.

Papandrea, whose producing credits include the mega-hits Gone Girl and Big Little Lies, says she and Chasin were “both fascinated by the idea of systemic privilege and how that breeds that sort of entitlement you see play out in the series”.

On the other hand, Friend is “a very complex actor”, she says. “You need that; you can’t cast someone who reads immediately (as a) villain.” Friend knocked back the role before taking it on, and Pap­andrea notes that characters accused of sexual abuse are “brave roles in some ways for men to take on”.

Asked what drew her to the role of a put-upon political spouse, Miller replies: “The calibre of the people involved was obviously an enormous part of it. David E. Kelley has a track record with this kind of format that I loved watching – Big Little Lies and The Undoing. And then Melissa James Gibson who (also) wrote the script is fantastic.”

Initially, Miller was daunted by playing such a central role across six episodes. “That was quite a daunting sight – six scripts – but I could not stop reading them, they were so compulsive and had twists and turns that I had not even seen coming.” She was also attracted to working with the “visionary” Clarkson, who charges moments of high emotional intensity with unconventional camera angles and surrealist elements and stunts (some of which Miller performed): “I love that she didn’t just shoot this (naturalistically) … She doesn’t play by the rules. She really has her own vision and that definitely elevated what might have been, in other hands, just telling the story.”

In the drama, Sophie and James are hounded relentlessly by the media outside court and their home. This, too, is reminiscent of Miller’s earlier career – from the break-up with Law to her widely publicised affair in 2008 with married actor Balthazar Getty.

These days, she co-parents her nine-year-old daughter, Marlowe, with actor and ex-partner Tom Sturridge.

She famously took on the British tabloids and paparazzi for breaches of privacy in 2008 and again last year when she reached a court settlement with London’s The Sun newspaper. “The idea of dissecting the press and the salaciousness of the tabloids and the paparazzi, which I really am very well versed in, was kind of interesting,” she says of the press scrums that feature in Anatomy of a Scandal.

Born in the US and raised in Britain by well-connected parents – her father is a banker turned art dealer and her mother is a former assistant to David Bowie – Miller studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute.

In 2012, she earned BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for playing Tippi Hedren – Alfred Hitchcock’s mistreated muse – in the HBO-BBC film The Girl, and further critical approbation came with American Woman and 21 Bridges (2019), an action film starring Chadwick Boseman in which she played a narcotics detective.

In 2019, she worked with Chasin and played opposite Russell Crowe in the Showtime miniseries The Loudest Voice, about Fox News founder Roger Ailes. Miller played an older woman, Ailes’s wife Beth, and was unrecognisable – even to herself – after undergoing hours of prosthetic makeup. “Sienna Miller unrecognisable with JOWLS,” ran an indignant Daily Mirror headline, with the word jowls in capital letters.

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt so liberated,” Miller quipped of her get-up for that role.

She was “truly unrecognisable”, says Chasin. “I had almost forgotten how beautiful she was.” According to the producer, given her recent performances, “she is in this golden moment in her career”: “We’re so quick to put women like Sienna in a certain type of box, especially when she was younger. Even now, she’s beautiful, she’s fashionable, she’s an easy target to underestimate.” She hopes the star’s performance in Anatomy of a Scandal will confirm that she has “landed”.

Naomi Scott in Anatomy of a Scandal

Despite her latest character being thrown into the blast furnace of a high-profile sexual scandal, Miller doesn’t see Sophie Whitehouse as a passive spouse. “She’s made this decision to marry this man. That was an agenda that she had from a young age. I think that she’s very determined to keep that all together,” she says.

“I imagined her like a swan on a lake that’s gliding around, but underneath the feet are kind of going 10 to the dozen … She’s very successful in hiding what she’s feeling at the time, but it catches up with her and it catches up with everyone in the show.” Everyone in this incident-packed drama, she notes, is “on an unravelling trajectory”.

Anatomy of a Scandal is screening on Netflix.