"I might have to breastfeed,” Sienna Miller says matter-of-factly, providing proof, should you need it, that she’s one cool mother. She disappears from her Zoom window where, moments before and much to the delight of myself and Dominic West, her co-star in Sky Atlantic’s glossy new legal drama War, she was holding her baby son.
“He loves the screen,” Miller replies. “Which is worrying.”
When she reappears, her baby is horizontal, disrupting the stripes of his mum’s Chanel top. The hamster, it transpires, “didn’t live long”.
West, who turns 57 next week, is less enthused. “I’m nearly f***ing 60, which is properly old,” he says, before conceding that acting may be uniquely suited to arresting that process. “In a way, you have to preserve a sort of childish innocence, because you’re just playing. The older you get, the more you realise it’s an absurd job, but I’m grateful to be able to do an absurd job and get paid for it. I keep meeting people who have got proper, grown-up jobs and are responsible, and I’m still doing what I was doing when I was eight.”
How did they prepare for their parts? Did Miller have any reservations about playing a selfish, needy, manipulative actor? “I was very newly pregnant when I got this script and very, very pregnant when we finished filming it, so the whole thing is a bit of a blur,” she says. “I wasn’t too fazed by the idea of playing an actress. I probably should have thought about it more, but it was quite clear from the start that we were very different people.”
For Miller, what appealed was this difference. “Carla’s quite cold and quite calculating, and I like the idea of toning down my own vulnerability, turning off the people-pleasing side. It was very liberating to not care what people think of you as a character.”
To research the darker mechanics of a high-net-worth divorce, West “talked to a guy who was a rich man who’d got divorced, and I asked him how brutal it gets. He said, ‘It gets absolutely awful.’ I suppose the richer they are, the more appalling the divorce is.”
What hooked him about Kay’s scripts, other than them being “absolute page-turners”, was the central question they kept returning to: how do people who love each other become people who want to kill each other? “The answer, in this case, is through lawyers.”
She adds: “I don’t think there’s anyone lovely in the show in the same way that there’s no one lovely in Succession. It’s the world of it.”
Miller says, judiciously: “Any life experience, positive or negative, that anyone goes through, we all use as kind of fodder for our work. It’s amazing to have an outlet like this. Actually, the more pain and the more joy and the more extremity of emotion you’ve experienced in your life, probably the better resources you have to dig from. I think you become a sum of the experiences of your life, and that enriches you as an actor. I don’t think in this case that I personally was drawing on one particular experience.” Pointedly, smiling, she concludes: “Having never been married or divorced, it was all just fun and games for me.”
Something West and Miller didn’t have to work on for War was their chemistry, which is evident from the moment West appears slightly late on-screen for our Zoom meeting. “There he is, swanning in on his own clock,” Miller snipes lovingly. The pair first worked together more than 20 years ago in a West End production of As You Like It alongside the late, great Helen McCrory.
With a candour that characterises the whole conversation, West agrees. “It’s dead easy to be in love with Sienna; you don’t really have to act any of that. We had this ease with each other, which you get after doing a play for months in the West End. The harder task was manufacturing the opposite.”
Playing real people, West says, carries a different weight to playing invented ones – something he felt keenly as Prince Charles in The Crown and even more so as Fred West in Appropriate Adult. “You usually feel a duty to argue for your character to be a better person than the writer wants them to be. With Charles, you don’t have the freedom that gives you – everyone already has a fixed idea of him.”
Even with West, the serial killer he played to widespread acclaim, he admits to the same reflex. “Unfortunately, I think it’s true even with murderers. You’re trying to find something human in them, something you like.”
For Miller, the pivot point in how she was perceived professionally came a decade ago, when she appeared in Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, both Oscar-nominated in 2015. “It definitely put me in a place where I was allowed to be seen as someone serious,” she says. “I’d had moments of that before, but they’d been overshadowed by a lot of toxic early-2000s fame.”
She is frank about how strange the early 2000s, when she was tabloid fodder due to her relationships and her fashion sense, now look in retrospect. She is also surprisingly sanguine about how appallingly she was treated by the tabloids; she was awarded substantial damages from News of the World in 2011 and News Group Newspapers, publisher of The Sun, in 2021. “I was watching that Mourinho documentary [on Netflix] and seeing the paparazzi in it, remembering how that was just how people lived. It’s so dated. It’s like smoking on a bus.”
With our time drawing to a close, I ask West about the BBC drama The Hour, in which he starred alongside Ben Whishaw and Romola Garai. It was where he first encountered Kay, who, as a newish writer, cut his teeth on Abi Morgan’s show. Would he return if there was a new series? Without hesitating, he says yes. “I saw Abi quite recently and she said she had an idea to bring it back and set it in 1968, against the backdrop of the year’s events, protests and riots. I think it’s a brilliant idea.”
Miller adds: “As you get older, you just have to be like, ‘I do this because of the experience of doing it. I cannot be too attached to the outcome.’ You can get stuck in the hamster wheel of chasing more success or rewards. I see it happening all the time. You need to remind yourself and check yourself regularly. So I’d like a job, too. Give us a job, Abi!”
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