Rupert Friend,speaking by telephone,said that Miller can give herself over to a character so completely that she seems practically possessed. “Sienna herself will be physically altered,will be either sweating or shaking,or her heartbeat will have increased,or a twitch will have occurred that she could never have planned,” he said.
When it came time to shoot the scene in which Sophie learns of her husband’s affair,Miller’s heart began to beat so fast and so loud that it registered on her microphone. “The feeling that something’s about to come out that you have absolutely no control over,the anxiety of knowing that you’ve got one sleep before something intensely personal is made extremely public,that’s an agonising state of affairs,” she said.
Yet Sophie ultimately handles her situation differently from the way Miller did. To say anything more risks spoilers,but Sophie’s approach to the reputational damage didn’t feel like an option for Miller back then,and so playing out Sophie’s narrative felt liberating,therapeutic even,she said.
“There’s catharsis in all of it,” Miller said. “Anytime you get to go to work and cry,it sort of feels weirdly good.”
Watching Miller in the role,Vaughan noted the rawness of her performance,the seeming honesty of it. And something else. “I don’t know if I’m reading into that because of knowing what she’s experienced,” Vaughan said. “But I think there’s an anger to it,but a contained anger.”
When asked where that anger came from,Miller said,“At this point,at 40,I have had experiences that I’ve internalised and can use – betrayal and a frustration at how much I just accepted and did not push back on and how little self-esteem I had.”
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She said this smiling,but there was also something spiky underneath it. Gibson,the showrunner,noted Miller’s ability to hold more than one emotional truth – fury,resignation,a wry amusement – at once,giving her performances a natural complexity.
“She deserves every challenge,” Gibson said,“because she’s up to it.”
These days,Miller has more self-esteem. It took a couple of decades,a dozen more roles and the birth of a child,but she knows who she is now,she said. Sophie’s speech about having been underestimated and overestimated goes on. She tells her adversary,“A lot of people think they know me. You think you know me. Trust me,you don’t.”
What does Miller wish that people – the ones who have spent 20 years staring at her face in fashion magazines or checkout tabloids – knew about her? Nothing.
“I’m less attached to really caring at this point,” she said. “I understand that I have much more substance than I was allowed to express as a person and always did. And I don’t know what to say about that. I mean,I’m very happy. I feel very grounded. I have a healthy child,and I’m working still,and I survived a pretty extraordinary decade,and many people didn’t. So there’s a kind of quiet pride in that side of it.
“What do I wish people knew?” she added. “I don’t.”
This article originally appeared inThe New York Times.
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