Being cheated on is bad enough, but when you and your partner are both in the public eye, the pain is compounded. Just ask Sienna Miller.
When Miller was in her early 20s, she became engaged to her Alfie costar, Jude Law, who in 2005 cheated on her with the nanny who looked after his kids with ex Sadie Frost. The whole thing played out on the front pages of the British tabloids (the nanny gave tell-all interviews and even let the papers publish her diary entries), and Law issued a public apology, stating, “I just want to say I am deeply ashamed and upset that I’ve hurt Sienna and the people most close to us. I want to publicly apologize to Sienna and our respective families for the pain that I have caused. There is no defense for my actions which I sincerely regret and I ask that you respect our privacy at this very difficult time,” per People.
But enduring a cheating scandal in her youth gave her the foundation for a role in the about-to-be-released Netflix adaptation of Anatomy of a Scandal, in which her character, Sophie, is cheated on by her politician husband (who may also be guilty of worse crimes). “I wanted to look at why I wanted to play Sophie, to put myself in a space that is ugly and familiar, and I quite like being a tourist in someone else’s reactions,” she told The Cut in April 2022. “Her reaction to betrayal was so measured and different from mine. So on a psychological level, to put yourself into someone else’s experience has a massive catharsis.”
Miller didn’t go into detail about the differences between her and Sophie’s reactions, but we can read between the lines. Back in 2005, Miller was in such a state of shock that she “doesn’t remember” a lot of the immediate aftermath, as she told The Daily Beast. It didn’t help that a tabloid was hacking her phone at the time.
“There were moments where it came close to making me really feel crazy, and it was incredibly aggressive. The way I managed it was to get really litigious, start suing. 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…. 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. I look back on it and wonder how I did get through it—but I did,” she told the outlet.
