Sienna miller
What’s cooking? Sienna Miller’s career, that’s what. After Foxcatcher and American Sniper, she’s back with more awards bait: chef epic Burnt. The star talks bonding with Bradley, knife skills and why G.I. Joe was a no-no…
Back with Bradley Cooper in chef dramedy Burnt.
Ican do some semi-karate moves. I can cook a turbot really well. I can belly dance...” At Total Film’s request, Sienna Miller is reeling off skills she’s learned from being in the movies. Another one for the list: dodging kitchenware hurled by Bradley Cooper. “Suddenly, we’re in a kitchen and he’s throwing pans at my head,” the star laughs, recalling life on set of Burnt, the chef-centric saga that reunites Miller with her American Sniper co-star. She’s not feeling well today – don’t worry, it’s not some wok-related injury, more a “tonsillitis-bronchitis thing” she explains, apologising in advance for any coughing or spluttering. Despite sounding chesty, she’s also chirpy – not least when discussing Cooper. “We went pretty much straight from that on to this,” she says of the American Sniper/Burnt one-two. “So we basically did a year of working together and are really close friends.”
Maybe not so friendly in the new movie, though: she teases a “horrible confrontation” between Cooper’s Adam Jones – a super-chef with a bad-boy rep – and Miller’s Helene, a young kitchen whiz who’s also raising a child alone. “He really goes for my character,” she says of the scene, recalling the scariness of watching a good mate morph into a monster. “Bradley has this thing when he gets really angry where the colour sort of drains from his face. I can’t describe it. The colours of his face change. When it happens, it’s like, ‘God… fuck!’”
But she wasn’t really scared. “No, because he’s an amazing actor,” she adds. “I love working with him and would do it again and again and again – and I hope we do, because it does work.” Not half: American Sniper was a $547m-grossing juggernaut, its runaway success taking everyone by surprise – including Miller. “An R-rated drama – it’s insane,” she marvels. Clint Eastwood’s man-of-war biopic also notched up six Oscar nominations, including one for Cooper’s coiled turn as real-life Navy SEAL Chris Kyle. No doubt Cooper owns the movie, but a good deal of its punch is down to his rapport with Miller as screen wife Taya: from their initial meet-cute (more meet-get-pissed, in fairness) to the heartrending phone-home when Chris finally cracks and tells Taya he’s ready to throw in the towel.
She played a strikingly similar role in Benedict Miller’s Foxcatcher: another supportive spouse to another beardy alpha male in another true-life tragedy. It also proved another major awards contender (five Oscar noms), making 2014 something of a banner year for 33-year-old Miller. Notching up such quality credits has altered her career outlook, she suggests. “Having been fortunate the past couple of years to work with some seriously great people, I realised I’d rather be something small and relatively insignificant in something brilliant than pretty good in a shit film,” she says frankly. “Or awful in a shit film – that’s even worse!” These days, Miller says, she’s more about the people than the part. “I think I’m
“If you want to work with great filmmakers, you need to have numbers behind you”
much, much more focused, where I never was before, on the director,” she explains. “I read a ton of really interesting parts recently and maybe didn’t have 100 per cent confidence in the director.” If the talent behind the camera isn’t somebody she’s excited about then she’d simply rather not work, “or just do theatre, which I’m really happy about.”
Talk turns to less-happy matters when we bring up 2009’s G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra – the sort of mega-budget, explosion-crazed popcorn fare she hadn’t made before and hasn’t been near since. Though she doesn’t look back with quite the same anger as co-star Channing Tatum – who recently told Howard Stern “I fucking hate that movie” – her memories aren’t especially fond. “For me, it wasn’t a great experience,” she says. “It was one of those things. I’d carved out a career in the independent world and felt really comfortable in that.”
So why did she decide to enlist as one of Hasbro’s toy soldiers? Strategy, she says. “It gets to a point where if you want to work with great filmmakers and you want to be doing quality independent films on that larger scale with the best people, you need to have numbers behind you. And I just didn’t, having always resisted those kinds of films.” The nearest things on her CV were the likes of underworld thriller Layer Cake, fantasy romp Stardust and the Alfie remake, none of which rewrote the record books. “It was kind of a whim, but I was offered [ G.I. Joe], and slightly guided into it, because it was like, ‘It’s not on my shoulders, but then it’ll make a ton of money and you’ve got numbers.’ It’s all strategy.”
She confesses to not feeling comfortable during filming – and not just because of wearing head-to-toe black on a roasting soundstage. For her trouble, she was awarded a Golden Raspberry (one of four the movie ‘won’) for her role as the evil Baroness who, to be fair, does have some memorable moments – like quipping “Nice shoes!” to woman she’s just held at gunpoint. But Miller doesn’t sound somewhat simpatico with the Razzie jury. “I’m the least villainous, least threatening person you’ve ever met,” she sighs. “They cast me without meeting me. I’m 5’5” and I couldn’t fire a gun, so every time I shot one in training I would blink. They had to design these glasses so that every time I pulled the trigger, I’d have to touch the side and make the glasses hide the fact that I was just a complete pussy with a gun.”
Clearly, she’s able to reflect on the whole episode with good humour. “It was an experience,” she concludes. “But I think I prefer the idea of R-rated dramas becoming monster smashes, as opposed to wearing leather and waving a Kalashnikov!” Though it doesn’t sound as if we’ll see her in anything so brazenly commercial any time soon, “You can never say never.” She notes that there are some “certain franchises” out there that might pique her interest, but signing up for say, a Marvel movie, would come down to the right material, the right director. “[ Those films] are definitely what people like to see,” she nods. “But it’s a massive commitment, a massive undertaking. Maybe when my daughter’s older she’ll want to see me in something like that.”
The conversation shifts to juggling motherhood (her daughter with Tom Sturridge, Marlowe, is three) with doing “little bits” in a variety of upcoming, hot-ticket projects. “It’s exciting, the diversity,” she says of her current slate. “The parts I’ve been shooting, they’re kind of smaller. I’m not carrying anything, so I’m not away for five months. I can dip in and out.” Recently, Miller’s hooked up with two of cinema’s biggest Bens: she’s amid the towering social inferno of Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise (“he’s a phenomenal filmmaker… by all accounts he’s made a really special film”) and she’s chomping at the bit to get started on Ben Affleck’s Prohibition crimer Live By Night – his first go in the director’s chair since Argo. “I play an Irish immigrant; she’s an amazing character in a really interesting era,” Miller enthuses.
She’ll be seen this October in gambling flick Mississippi Grind (with Ryan Reynolds), and at time of talking to TF, she was just about to head out to Belfast (hopefully with plenty of Lemsip in her luggage) to shoot The Lost City Of Z, the latest from James Gray ( We Own
The Night, Two Lovers). “It’s about Colonel
Percy Fawcett [ played by Charlie Hunnam], the explorer who set out to map the Amazon,” she says. “I play his wife, Nina, who was kind of a suffragette, a very forward-looking, interesting woman.” Alas, she won’t get to
venture to South America. “No. The women get left behind. I could say I’m upset, but actually I couldn’t take a three-year-old into the Amazon so it’s probably for the best!”
Besides, it sounds like she felt plenty of heat in the kitchens of Burnt (formerly known, more innocuously, as Adam Jones). While the internet seems to think the movie’s a comedy, Miller begs to differ. “I don’t that it’s a comedy… I don’t know what it is!” she says. “Tonally it’s quite difficult to describe because there are definitely comedic moments, but there’s some intense drama, too. It’s romantic, funny, sad… it’s got a bit of everything, but it’s not a broad comedy by any means.” Indeed, Cooper’s character is a former addict; “a tortured man trying to find salvation” as Miller puts it. Then there’s the friction of the (literal) pressure-cooker environment, with Miller’s Helene “circumnavigating a very maleaggression world”. “I suppose it’s really about the dynamic between people in a kitchen, and the burning ambition that these chefs have. They tend to be really interesting, really driven characters; for them work is almost like a kind of military operation.”
Cooper’s prep for Burnt has been welldocumented; news sites salivated over him tossing patties in Burger King last summer. Miller also got stuck in, training with two-star Michelin chef Marcus Wareing, “doing knife skills”. Which is where the turbot-filleting came in. “I stank of fish!” she laughs, “I kind of sealed it into my fingers...” It’s easy to imagine all the blood, smell and odours transmuting into gold – out this October, Burnt is primed for awards season. Miller’s not short of experience in the field – on top of the
Sniper/Foxcatcher doublewhammy, she received a 2012 Golden Globe nom for HBO’s The
Girl, where she essayed empathy and dignity (as well as old-Hollywood glamour) as Hitchcock’s badgered muse Tippi Hedren.
“It’s a really weird time of year,” Miller reckons of the whole awards derby. She
describes it with some ambivalence: “It’s great to be part of something respected enough to be in that conversation. At the same time, it’s not the be-all and end-all because like any kind of political campaign, it comes down to how much money, how much press… It doesn’t necessarily feel as valuable when you see how it all works.” Nevertheless, awards prestige does make a difference, she maintains. “What it means is you can go on and make films you may not have been able to before; it opens the doors to other filmmakers you’d love to work with.”
Miller won’t reveal exactly who’s left to work with from her bucket list (“I’m sure it’s the same as anyone else’s!”), nor will she say what’s in her five-year plan – because there isn’t one as such. “I’ve never been that person in any aspect of my life, really,” she muses. “It’s always what felt right in the moment, I suppose. I’m not anxious to work all the time. I’m happy to be a little more selective. I’m really comfortable – there’s no strategy.” But what about all those skills she’s soaked up? The fish-cutting, the karatechopping… surely there’s a movie to be made combining the lot? Miller chuckles. “Maybe
that’s something Marvel could do...”
Burnt opens on 16 October. Mississippi Grind opens on 23 October.