American Sniper actress Sienna Miller said there is more than a month of memories from 2005 that she cannot recall because of the heartbreak and public scrutiny she faced at the same time in the fallout of Jude Law‘s affair with the nanny of his children. In July 2005, Miller was acting on stage in a production of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It when Law issued a statement to the press, apologizing for his affair. Miller, who was just starting her film career, struggled to finish the stage production while paparazzi constantly hounded her.
“That was one of the most challenging moments I hope I’ll ever have to experience,” Miller told The Daily Beast. “Because with that level of public heartbreak, to have to get out of a bed let alone stand in front of 800 people every night, it’s just the last thing you want to do.” Miller, 38, said it was “really hard” to perform. “The other thing was, it was at the height of all that paparazzi madness, and in London where there was an epidemic of bad behavior,” she continued. “They knew where I would be every night.”
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Miller and Law got engaged on Christmas Day 2004. In July 2005, Law publicly apologized to Miller for cheating on her with the nanny of the three children he shares with his ex-wife Sadie Frost. “I want to publicly apologize to Sienna and our respective families for the pain that I have caused,” Law said at the time. Fifteen years later, Miller has “no recollection” of the As You Like It production.
“People who came to see me said we had dinner, and I don’t remember,” Miller said. “I was in so much shock over it all. And I’d really just begun. I was only 23. But if you get through that, you feel like you can get through anything.”
Miller was also among the celebrities whose phone was hacked by the News of the World newspaper. In 2011, she was awarded ยฃ100,000 (about $134,395) after the paper admitted to wrongdoing. Miller said she is “pretty resilient” and decided to combat the issue by filing lawsuits. “I secretly recorded paparazzi on a lighter that was a camera and got a privacy act taken to a high court to get the law changed in England, which essentially means that if I’m anywhere or coming out of anywhere where I can expect privacy they’re not allowed to take my photo,” Miller explained.
Miller admitted she may have been “really paranoid” during the scandal and, looking back, is amazed at how she survived. “There was so
much noise that it was hard to think straight and focus on my work, which I always took very seriously. It ate everything else,” she told the Daily Beast. “I look back on it and wonder how I did get through it – but I did.”
The actress has gone on to star in several acclaimed films, including Foxcatcher, Mississippi Grind, and American Sniper. Last year, she starred in Showtime’s miniseries about Roger Ailes, The Loudest Voice. Her newest movie is Wander Darkly, which was screened at the Sundance Film Festival and will be released on Dec. 11.
