Sienna Miller is used to being overshadowed. In James Gray's The Lost City of Z, the men get to have all the fun while her character, Jane Fawcett, sits at home with the children. Based on the real-life wife of Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), an early 20th century British explorer who continually journeyed to the Amazon seeking a mythic city made of gold, Jane dreams of having her own grand adventure. When Percy decides to return to South America after a previous failed attempt, Jane suggests she go with him. An independent proto-feminist type, she insists to her husband that they are intellectual equals. Percy scoffs. He says that might be true, but men and women have different physical capabilities.
"The jungle is no place for a woman," Percy assures her, all but patting his pretty wife on the head. If you replace the wilds of Bolivia with Los Angeles, it's easy to picture a Hollywood executive saying the same thing.
Jane, a woman who just so happens to share a name with the frequent damsel-in-distress of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan series, is the Peak Sienna Miller role: a woman tasked with watching the men around her do all the things she would like to do. Miller is a living embodiment of how little space the industry makes for women and a reminder of what those women must do in order to be seen. Since her first appearance in the 2001 comedy South Kensington, Miller has starred in 26 movies, an enviable sum for any actor. You've heard of many of these films, many of which were both good and successful, but you might not even remember she was in them.
Jane is the third wife that Miller has played in as many years. The 35-year-old actor was tasked with the widow role in both American Sniper and Foxcatcher, prestige films in which Slate's Gabrielle Moss argued that her character motivation is primarily to "react" to what's happening in a man's life. Each of these pictures were prestige projects that garnered serious awards attention, and her on-screen husbands in both films (Cooper and Mark Ruffalo for American Sniper and Foxcatcher, respectively) were nominated for Oscars.
Hunnam is garnering buzz for The Lost City of Z, a handsome epic that marries the visual style of David Lean to Werner Herzog. Stories about the actor's performance focus on the demands of his Method technique—starving himself and refusing to speak to his co-stars on set in order to burrow into the heart of a lonely hunter who never snared his intended prey. Miller, on the other hand, garnered more attention for "flirting" with Brad Pitt, a producer on the film, than the movie she actual movie she was in. She dismissed tabloid reports of a budding romance between the two as "predictable."
Miller's love life frequently overshadows her acting talents, or at least it's treated as the only thing about her that's worthy of attention. In the Steve Buscemi two-hander Interview, the actor-director plays a journalist, Pierre Peders, tasked with doing a fluff piece on a frivolous soap-opera star, Katya. Miller plays his famous subject. When Pierre gets the assignment, he remarks that his subject is "more famous for who she sleeps with than anything else."
That's a pretty overt acknowledgment of a problem that has plagued Miller her entire career. Layer Cake, a 2004 crime drama co-starring Daniel Craig, should have been her breakout role, playing a gangster's moll who uses lingerie as a weapon. Directed by Matthew Vaughn, it's the movie that got Craig the role of James Bond. Instead, Miller became famous for her affair with Jude Law, her co-star in a remake of Alfie that came out the same year. When they met, Law was married to Sadie Frost, an English actor he subsequently left for Miller. Miller and Law's relationship was like Gossip Rag Christmas. Just months after the then 32-year-old actor proposed to his former mistress, Law got a new one. He slept with his nanny, fulfilling the life cycle of the lascivious male.
Law has since enjoyed a wide range of meaty parts with little damage done to his career—from playing the frequently befuddled Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes to a domineering count in Anna Karenina. He has done thrillers (Side Effects), comedies (Spy), indie darlings (The Grand Budapest Hotel), fantasy (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus), romantic comedies (The Holiday), action (the forthcoming King Arthur), and prestige TV (The Young Pope). Even during the Sadie Frost scandal, he even got to play a serial cheater in Mike Nichols' Closer—with few people remarking upon the coincidence.
Law was quickly able to put the past behind him. But over a decade later, people still can't stop asking Miller about that time her boyfriend had a wife—and whether the star-crossed lovers might get back together. Last year, she told Porter magazine that she still cares about her ex "enormously." Miller remarked to Elle Australia that she was "young and naive."
Miller's career is a perfect storm of a tabloid culture that treats women's talent as secondary to whatever strapping male they happen to be spotted eating spaghetti with and an industry that offers meaningful opportunities to extremely few women. Despite her wide name recognition, you might be hard pressed to name a single movie Sienna Miller has actually starred in. How about Alfie, High-Rise, or Burnt? Maybe Live by Night or Stardust, where her characters are all but banished from the film within the first 15 minutes? When discussing the topic of this essay with a friend, he didn't recall that Miller was even in American Sniper and Foxcatcher—despite the fact that he'd reviewed them both.
There's an old saying attributed to Constantin Stanislavski, the famed theatre director, that "there are no small parts, only small actors." When you're going out for the senior production of Grease and you wind up cast as a member of the chorus instead of Rizzo, the part you wanted, that phrase is used to reassure that you'll find a way to shine from the background.
With all due respect to theater kids everywhere, that's a lie. Any woman who has had to play Ben Affleck's long-suffering girlfriend or Prostitute #2 in a Jason Statham vehicle knows that you can bring every ounce of charisma you have, but there's a certain ceiling of achievement on a part that only calls for so much. This a problem that afflicts many good actors who aren't named "Meryl Streep" or "Cate Blanchett." Examples include Bryce Dallas Howard, Jennifer Garner, Olivia Wilde, Kristen Bell, Zoe Saldana, and Jennifer Connelly—very good actors whose filmographies are littered with roles that could have been filled by just about any other person.
Miller has admitted that her storied personal life "burnt a lot of bridges" early in her career, and that might be true. When she first met Jude Law, Miller was just 21—a time when science shows humans are at their most reckless and stupid. (That's the entire premise of MTV's programming.) The truth is less cut and dry: Because there's such little space for women in Hollywood, any possible strike against you as a woman will be used to disqualify you—in order to explain away why you don't deserve more. Anne Hathaway, who shied away from the spotlight of the public eye since winning an Oscar in 2013, is "too desperate to be liked." Nicole Kidman, as BuzzFeed's Anne Helen Petersen recently pointed out, has never been able to escape being a famous man's ex-wife. Sienna Miller—well, can she even act?
The fact that Miller rarely leaves an impression in the projects she's in has frequently been lobbied as a criticism of her acting skills instead of being rightly viewed as a byproduct of what women have to do in order to fit into a very tiny box. They disappear. Reviewing Miller's small supporting role in 2009's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, a bargain bin adaptation of the Michael Chabon novel, Nick Pinkerton of The Village Voice called her a "void," writing that "one can forget she's in the movie from scene to scene."
When given material that bothers to utilise her, however, Miller is an electric, unpredictable presence. Her role in Interview plays extremely close to the bone. When Pierre shows up to profile her, he confesses that he has never seen any of her films, believing her to be just another dilettante flashing her bare crotch to get attention. But the soap star decides to prove her acting ability by duping her interviewer. She convinces Pierre that she's in a toxic romance with her partner, with whom she is no longer in love, and that she has cancer. The film, thus, serves a dual purpose: Not only does Katya have to show that she's more than a Lindsay Lohan wannabe, but the actor who plays her finally gets a chance to spread her wings.
Miller, who soars in Interview, exudes that most rare of star qualities: You can't take your eyes off her. She effectively uses every inch of the screen to keep the audience watching, wondering what she'll do next. The heated conversation, which primarily takes place in her apartment, slowly turns into a game of cat and mouse between reporter and subject. Pouncing onto the table, Katya expounds on her theory that fishnets send a message to men that a woman is being held captive. She's an easy target. "Fishnet stockings are a net," she says, "and the woman is imprisoned within that net."
Interview hit cinemas in 2007, a year after Miller's other high-profile star turn—as Edie Sedgwick in the mediocre biopic Factory Girl—was a critical and commercial flop. The decade since has not been kind to her. After winning a Razzie for wearing a bad wig in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, she didn't work for three years, when she landed the role of Tippi Hedren in the BBC/HBO film The Girl. But there are signs that her career is once again blossoming, if the directors she has worked with in the last five years show a sign of progress. Miller once described the parts she plays as "pop up" roles in "classy" movies, a chance to work with auteurs whose films she admires. Bennett Miller, her Foxcatcher director, also made Capote and Moneyball. Live By Night was Ben Affleck's first feature since winning an Oscar for Argo. High-Rise teamed her with Kill List's Ben Wheatley, one of indie cinema's most promising talents. Clint Eastwood, the man behind American Sniper, needs little introduction.
When she got the script for The Lost City of Z, Miller auditioned because of whose name was on the cover: James Gray. After The Immigrant and Two Lovers, Gray has mounted a claim as one of the premier American filmmakers working today, the kind of person you'd call a film lover's director. There was just one problem. During the first table read for the film, Miller scribbled a pointed note onto her copy of the script. "The wife?" she asked. Gray was puzzled by the feedback, wondering what she could possibly mean. After being cast as human wallpaper time and again, designed to fade into the background, Miller wanted to play a character with actual agency, not just the imitation of an inner life. Here is a woman whose husband, just as in American Sniper, routinely travels off to get himself killed, stranding her at home. What's her journey in all this?
The Lost City of Z, which treats Jane's suffering as symbolic of a woman's limited choices in the early 20th century, is as much a comment on Hollywood as it is Edwardian Britain. Virginia Woolf, who was 24 the first time Percy Fawcett left for South America, once wondered in A Room of One's Own, her 1929 novella, what feats women could achieve if they were nourished for greatness the same way men are. What masterpieces might Shakespeare's sister have in her? Nearly a century later, the only question worth asking is the one we almost never do.
