Sienna Miller may seem the quintessential young British actress with proper English diction, a London home and a BAFTA nomination. But she has a dark secret: She’s really a New Yorker. The actress was born in the Big Apple and lived here for a year before moving to the UK. She even has an American passport. “I think you always have an affinity with the place where you were born,” she says. However, there is a downside. “When people find out I was born in New York they think I’m faking my British accent.”
This month the 28-year-old star returns home to make her Broadway debut in the lead role of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of After Miss Julie. (Previews start on September 18 and the play will run through December 6.) The fast-paced, three-person drama is set in the kitchen of a posh British country manor on the eve of the Labour Party’s surprise election win in 1945, which swept Winston Churchill out of offi ce. “It was a time when everybody felt that the world was changing,” says the play’s director, Mark Brokaw. “When the class system seemed to be dissolving and when all seemed possible.” It’s an adaptation of August Strindberg’s late-19th-century play Miss Julie by playwright Patrick Marber, who is well-known for penning the smash hit Closer.
Even though the play takes place more than 60 years ago, “It feels much more current to us,” says Brokaw. “I thought so much about it during this last election when people were in the streets celebrating Obama’s victory.”
As Miss Julie, the dangerously fl irtatious and irreverent daughter of the manor’s owner, Miller spends most of the play’s 70 minutes scandalously wooing and sparring with her father’s chauffeur. Her foil is played by fellow Brit Jonny Lee Miller (no relation), most recently seen in the ABC TV series Eli Stone. “It’s a pretty full-on play. It’s going to war every night with Jonny,” Miller says. “Patrick Marber’s dialogue is so amazingly written. I wish I could be that clever in a fight.”
But the play isn’t just a screaming match. And like Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Miss Julie is a dark character whose motives are complicated. She is both victim and antagonist. “I want to make her sympathetic in some way so you understand that she’s not just this promiscuous, spoiled person. Actually she has a reason for being that way,” Miller explains. “It’s very easy to get carried away with the shouting and the insults and lose sight of the fragility.”
For Brokaw the character also must have a real presence. “[She] is the object of desire for her sexuality but also for her class in society. That’s something that somebody either has or they don’t,” he says. “She has such an effortless charisma. And a beauty that just kind of radiates from her. And I think that’s what Miss Julie needs.”
To get into Miss Julie’s head, Miller visited a number of historic estates around England to get a sense of what it was like to live and work in a manor house. She also immersed herself in the popular culture of the era, listening to music and watching movies. “It’s really hard for me to relate to the euphoria of that [night] without, obviously, having lived it or studied it,” she says. Miller interviewed people who lived the history—in this case, those who actually experienced the jubilation of the landmark election—just as she did to prepare for her role as Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick in 2006’s Factory Girl.
Pretending to be Sedgwick was very draining and ultimately made Miller a little crazy. “I was really trying to feel everything she felt and make friends with a lot of her family and a lot of her friends,” she says. “It began to infiltrate my own life in a way where I felt like I was a little lost.” But the experience didn’t scare her away from taking on another challenging character. “I love playing tortured, messed-up people for some reason,” she says. “To me that’s more interesting than being the perfect person. It’s the parts of ourselves we don’t want to admit to.” In Miss Julie, Miller has defi nitely found a demanding role. “I love pushing myself in an emotional way,” she says.
