Sienna Miller has said that she grew to relish playing an unpleasant character on Broadway.

The actress appeared opposite Jonny Lee Miller in After Miss Julie, which closed last year.

Miller told Stylist: “In New York, the audiences were very vocal, which was quite difficult because my character in that play was quite poisonous as a person.

“Every night they’d be like, ‘Oh, she’s disgusting! What a vile woman’, and it’s hard not to take that personally.

“At first I was really trying to go for the sympathy vote, but by the end of it I sort of loved being detestable. I was ashen on the floor, spitting on Jonny. In the end I found it really liberating.”

Asked if, as an actress, she could not disassociate herself from the role, Miller added: “A lot of what inhibits me is my attachment to what people think. I overcame a hurdle with After Miss Julie because I didn’t need to be loved [by everybody].”

Quizzed on how she responds to online criticism of her as a person, she said: “I just don’t read things. In our family we have a ‘no Google’ policy. In fact, I rarely use the internet. I don’t even do social networking.”

It’s a big gallery catch-up update today. I’ve added photos from the final two events that Sienna attended last year, her appearance on Letterman to promote After Miss Julie, plus additions from a few other appearances she made late last year. More from the After Miss Julie After Party to come still. I’ve also added some stills from After Miss Julie, and photos from Sienna’s trip to the Congo early last year. All the additions are listed below

• New York City, March 8th x3 more
• Session #028 x16 replaced with HQ versions
• “After Miss Julie” Opening Night – Arrivals & Curtain Call x44 more
• The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond – New York Premiere x27
• Harvey Weinstein Hosts Dinner for The Private Lives of Pippa Lee x6
• Rag & Bone Soho Store Opening x3 more
• In the Congo, 2009 x9
• After Miss Julie > On Stage stills x9
• Late Show With Letterman > October 13th 2009 – Show Stills x11
• Late Show With Letterman > October 13th 2009 – Arriving at/leaving the studio x112

August Strindberg’s 1888 play Miss Julie is lauded as a great work, but I’m not so sure about that. It’s a terse, cold play that examines an archetypal hysterical female, locked into rigid ideas of sex and class, as if she were a bug under a jar. It is scarily persistent, though, and Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie is the rare reimagining of a classic play that may actually improve upon the original. This passionate reworking shifts the setting to a country estate outside London in 1945—when the differences between lower and upper classes were supposedly dissolving—and strives to understand Strindberg’s confused characters instead of just diagnosing them.

Miss Julie (Sienna Miller) is the privileged daughter of the manse, a haughty vixen clearly taken with John (Jonny Lee Miller), her father’s chauffeur. She strides into the kitchen oblivious to the fact that John and his maybe-fiancée, the solid and religious Christine (Marin Ireland), might be wanting some time alone. No: She demands that John must come outside and dance with Miss Julie; he must pour her a drink; he must, humbly and erotically, kiss her shoe. John, whose identity is shaped entirely by his job serving her family, at first resists, then succumbs to her manipulative seductions by confessing his lifelong love, and finally grows repulsed as their ill-matched plans for each other unfold. They humiliate and degrade one another, practically searing brands into each other’s skin.

Class Wars
Patrick Marber updates Strindberg.

Patrick Marber’s “After Miss Julie” (a Roundabout Theatre Company production at the American Airlines), a version of August Strindberg’s gnarly, pathfinding 1888 tragedy about class division and desire, puts a new engine in an old chassis; the problem is internal combustion. In transposing the play from late-nineteenth-century Sweden to England in July, 1945, on the night of the British Labour Party’s landslide victory over Winston Churchill and the Conservatives at the end of the Second World War—a paradigm shift that would usher in the welfare state—Marber strips much of the need from the characters’ conflict and gums up the dramatic machinery. As a result, the vehicle accelerates swiftly, only to lose traction and spin out of control.

Of the many circumstances that drive the original, aristocratic Miss Julie into her kitchen to dance with the valet—dusk, the Midsummer festival, her period, her broken engagement, her father’s absence from their stately home—the most essential is her hysteria. As we learn in the play’s first lines, Miss Julie has a habit of making a reckless spectacle of herself. By turning sexual and social decorum on its head, she projects her craziness onto others: they end up confounded, instead of her. Alternately sadistic and seductive, her manic behavior broadcasts her suicidal stalemate. She wants to be “under the ground,” she says early in the original play. She feels the immanence of decline, and she uses her wounds as a lure. “I am coming down in the world,” she admits to Jean, the valet. He, by contrast, is defined by his desire to rise. Each needs something in the other, though they don’t need each other. Jean sees Miss Julie and her wealth (consciously) as a chance at life; Miss Julie sees Jean and his forcefulness (unconsciously) as a chance at death.

To stop this page from looking so bare because of the new news system, I’ve added screencaps from a new interview by Mail Online (watch it here), which features footage from After Miss Julie. It appears to be a press interview for the stage production, as in one part you can see her co-stars Jonny Lee Miller and Marin Ireland.

Thanks to ‘Green‘ for downloading this video for us.

• Mail Online (UK) – October 21st 2009 x133

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