‘I felt self-conscious and ashamed’: Sienna Miller on tabloid intrusion – and why she can’t bear boho chic

The funny thing is, Sienna Miller can’t stand boho chic. “Don’t you think it sounds annoying?” asks the eternal poster girl for hippy-luxe, festival-adjacent summer dressing. Actually, from where I’m sitting right now, boho chic looks pretty damn good. Barefoot in jeans and a tissue-fine T-shirt, ropes of Botticelli-blond hair tumbling over her shoulders, Miller looks absurdly radiant even on Microsoft Teams, after “a rough baby night” with her second daughter. “That’s very nice of you,” she says sunnily, “but you know, there just is a bohemian way of dressing, isn’t there? It’s not like I invented anything.” She shrugs. “When I was younger the 70s and 60s really resonated for me. I bought vintage things at markets.”

But Miller, 42, knows better than most that fame can mean that the media, not you, get to decide who the world thinks you are. The actor survived a harrowing experience as the victim of phone hacking, a decade having her personal life ransacked for tabloid entertainment followed by another fighting for justice. So the fact that the world now has a habit of mistaking her wardrobe for her personality feels like small fry. Having won damages from News Group Newspapers and two paparazzi photo agencies in 2008 for breaching her privacy, she later took action against the News of the World and then testified at the Leveson inquiry after accepting £100,000 in compensation from the tabloid paper after it hacked her voicemail.

 

Last year, Miller spoke in a BBC documentary about the agonising period in 2005 when tabloids broke the story of her boyfriend Jude Law’s affair and then revealed to the world that Miller was pregnant, making her decision as to whether to go ahead with the pregnancy horrendously public. She won damages from the Sun in 2021 after claiming it had accessed her medical records in 2005 (the newspaper denies this). A traumatised Miller left Britain in 2016, spending seven years living in New York before returning last year.

She is delighted to be back in London. “I had a very intense decade of scrutiny in this country. Everywhere I went, I felt self-conscious and ashamed. So for the first five years in New York, I was so happy. I could breathe there.” But after the pandemic, she started to miss home. “New York has changed. It has always been the centre of whatever the culture is, and that means a lot of TikTokkers and influencers. By the end, I was sort of hanging out by the baked beans in the English shops, which was quite tragic. But I needed that break from England before I could come back and feel at home again.”