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28 January 2014By Alex Bilmes, Photos by Tom Craig

Sienna Miller’s skyrocketing career was driven off course by her tabloid notoriety. Now older (a little) and wiser (a little more), she’s back to reclaim her place at Hollywood’s top table. For Esquire, Alex Bilmes joins her for drinks, dinner and – why not? – more drinks

And then I turned around and she was gone, vanished into the early morning, home to boyfriend and baby, taking her sparkle with her, and suddenly it really was the time it really was, in the back of a bar on Old Compton Street, in the company of a gallery of Soho rogues, and while I certainly wasn’t hammered (please, I’m a professional), I wasn’t exactly undrunk, either, and I, too, had a bed to go to and a tiny child to be screamed at by.

And to think it had all started so quietly, if not quite soberly, many, many hours earlier, at Scott’s, the plutocratic Mayfair fish restaurant, where we’d slurped oysters and cocktails and made periodic trips outside to sit under space heaters and smoke fags. And talked to each other, and at each other, and occasionally over each other about feminism and social media and the press and public morality and twerking, obviously, and all the stuff you might expect people in our weird positions talk about when we’re starting to feel a bit spangled. Some of this into my voice recorder, some of it into the wind – and from time to time one of us (not always me, in truth) would remember we were supposed to be doing an interview and return to the topics of her life and career, but then inevitably we’d veer off course again, setting the world to rights over Sancerre and Marlboro Lights.

Because that’s the thing about Sienna Miller: she’s irresistible and irrepressible – a party starter, a human firework. She’s fidgety and exuberant, coltish, gushy, tactile, generous with compliments and also larky and piss-takey. She’s vivacious, convivial, a joiner-in-er, one of the gang. Of course, she’s beautiful, too, disarmingly so: tawny, kittenish, slim, blonde, blue-eyed – a starlet in the classic mould. And she’s famously soignée, too, tonight in tight black trousers, strappy heels, a low-cut, floaty white tank top over a blue bra and under a glittering, sequined black jacket, with a fur thrown on top when we go outside. She’s wearing a big statement necklace, which, of course I neglect to ask about just as I neglect to ask about so many things. Because, in a word, she is diverting. She’s a distraction from whatever it is you’re trying to get done. In this case, have a vaguely sensible conversation, for the record, excerpts of which we can later string together to fill the spaces between the photographs. So here goes.

When she arrives at our table at Scott’s, I’m already making progress on an aperitif.

Sienna (pointing at it): "What’s that? Campari and soda?”

Me (feeling good about myself): "A negroni.”

Sienna: "Dad drink. Total dad drink.”

She orders a dirty martini and we study the menu.

Sienna: "We should be really chic and have the shellfish platter. If we were cool, we’d have that.”

Me (still smarting from the dad-drink slur): "But we’re not cool.”

Sienna: "Well, I am.”

Instead, she orders oysters. The waiter wonders if she’d like them, in the house style, with a spicy sausage?

Sienna (in her best ooh-er-missus): "I beg your pardon!”

When they arrive, she points with her fork at the largest.

Her: "Do you want my big oyster?”

Me: "OK.”

Sienna: "That wasn’t a euphemism, by the way.”

Me: "Jesus, it’s like having dinner with Sid James.”

Sienna: "Oh, my God. It is! I don’t get out much.”

Pause.

Sienna: "Oh, this is so nice! I love a dinner.”

Me: "Mmm, so do I.”

Sienna: "I love a lunch, too.”

Me: "A lunch is good, no doubt about it.”

Sienna: "Sometimes I love a lunch that goes into a dinner. Double games, I call it.”

At this point, haplessly, hopelessly, I try to steer the conversation towards her situation back in 2009, when last I interviewed her for a magazine article.

Me: "I remember you were single.”

Sienna: "Was I, though? You never know with me, Alex.”

Me: "Were you not single?”

Sienna: "I was single.”

Pause.

Sienna: "Do you plan these, by the way, these interviews?”

Me: "You’re suggesting I’m underprepared?”

Sienna: "No!”

Pause.

Me: "How did you meet Tom?”

Sienna (her mouth full of oyster): "Wha’?”

Me: "Tom, your fiancé Tom, remember? How did you two meet?”

Sienna: "Boring!”

Pause.

Sienna: "Shall we go for another fag?”

Me: "Definitely.”

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