There is a change in Hollywood. It’s all moving towards a better place for women
HEN most actors transform themselves for roles it involves heavy prosthetics or the incredible gaining or losing of weight.
They are unrecognisable under wigs, false noses, or an extra 30lb.
But Sienna Miller does not need any of those things to completely disappear for her latest role, that of a single mother whose life is changed forever when her teenage daughter goes missing.
Set over 11 years in rural Pennsylvania, American Woman follows Deb Callahan as she is left to raise her young grandson and hope that one day she will discover what happened to his mother.
“I read it and I knew within 10 pages that I had to do it, I just fell in love with her,” Sienna says earnestly, as she leans forward in her chair in a London hotel room.
“I loved everything about the way that it was written and I loved that she begins as one woman and ends a different woman and you get to see somebody mature and earn respect as you go on.
“I had a really clear vision for it and it felt like a total gift.”
In fact it was the gift that 37-yearold Sienna had been waiting for – a true leading role after supporting parts in prestige projects such as Foxcatcher, American Sniper, High-Rise and The Lost City Of Z.
“I’ve done a lot of films where I was a supporting part in really big, great films, but you’re really focused on making an impact without that much time to do it and this felt like something I could map out in its entirety.
“It was just absorbing and allencompassing because she was such a complete woman.
“It certainly was different to anything I had ever read and I think people are finally more focused on female-centric stories.
“It could have gone in a million different ways – it could have been a thriller, it could have been generic – but it was really in that 1970s way of film-making, a study of a woman and her life and everything happens through her perception of it, which you see all the time with men but I’ve certainly never had that opportunity as a woman.”
She takes a pause as she sits back in her chair.
“I didn’t feel unsatisfied with the work that I had done, I felt like I had had opportunities to play really rich, diverse people, but I had never been in every scene of a film before.
“That meant that I felt in charge of a story and in charge of how an entire thing was portrayed.
“I could map it out in a detailed way, how she should move in the first iteration of her to the second to the third.
“When the movie begins I felt like she should never sit still, she was just a simmering, bubbling ball of energy so a lot of it was handheld and I just wanted freedom to move around so I could hop up on a counter.
“She is just always moving to the point where it’s quite jarring.
“And then the tragedy happens and there is sort of stunned slowdown, she’s in a little bit of shock and by the end it’s just more grounded and still.
“It was more work and I really love hard work.” Sienna Miller plays a mother coping after her daughter goes missing, leaving her to bring up her grandchild. The actress says she found that, as a mother herself, the role was particularly distressing
But more work brought profound pain, as she immersed herself in the mind of a mother who loses her child (Sienna herself is a mother to sevenyear-old Marlowe, her daughter with actor Tom Sturridge).
“It was agony,” she admits, “because