Sienna Miller plays a woman whose husband’s infidelity is exposed in the British press in the new Netflix series. The echoes of her own life drew her in.

Miller read the scripts for “Anatomy of a Scandal,” a high-gloss limited series created by David E. Kelley and Melissa James Gibson, straight through two years ago. “I binged them in the way that you would want to binge a six-part drama,” she explained.

Sophie, the silky wife of James (Rupert Friend), a legislative minister, had been offered to her. Sophie would require all of Miller’s abilities and traits, including charisma, fragility, attractiveness, and wit. Sophie is solidly the lead in a career where she has generally been consigned to supporting wife and girlfriend roles. Miller, on the other hand, paused. “I had reservations because it felt sort of ugly and familiar,” she said.

Sophie discovers that James has had an affair with a coworker in the first episode, and The Daily Mail will publish the news the next morning. The parallels were evident for Sienna Miller , who had survived a mid-2000s scandal in which her then-fiancé Jude Law slept with his children’s babysitter.

However, much like how you might feel tempted to brush your fingers over a scar after a cut has healed, Miller was drawn to the role because of the opportunity to revisit these former experiences. “In the weird, twisted way that somehow exists, I was drawn to that, to exploring that from a different perspective,” she said.

This occurred on a recent weekday morning at the restaurant of a boutique hotel in Manhattan’s West Village, close to where Miller and her 9-year-old daughter Marlowe reside. Sophie wears velvety golds, creams, and taupes in “Anatomy of a Scandal,” which premieres on Netflix on Friday. Miller wore off-white trousers and a beige sweater with overlapping necklaces at her neckline that morning, using the same colour scheme.

Sienna Miller isn’t Sophie, of course. She is liberal where Sophie is conservative, and she is uninhibited where Sophie is restricted. Sophie takes on the role of the ideal politician’s wife for personal reasons. Role-playing is completely professional for Miller. Her off-camera persona is unpretentious and approachable. Despite this, there are times in “Anatomy of a Scandal” when Sophie’s life appears inextricably linked to the actor portraying her.

Take, for example, a late-episode scene in which Sophie faces a non-adversary. “I have been simultaneously under and overestimated my entire life,” she says. “If I have traded on the currency that the world told me was mine, well, that’s what I was trained to do.” It’s difficult to tell who is speaking.

These parallels were not missed on Sarah Vaughan, who developed Sophie in her 2018 novel and serves as an executive producer on the show. They give her performance “an extra level of nuance and meaning,” according to Vaughan.

In filming the series, Sienna Miller also deliberately drew on her past. “There is a kind of muscle memory about many of her experiences that I have. So it was quite available,” she said. Sometimes, it was almost too available.

Friend, speaking by telephone, said that Miller can give herself over to a character so completely that she seems practically owned. “Sienna herself will be physically altered, will be either sweating or shaking, or her heartbeat will have increased, or a twitch will have occurred that she could never have planned,” he said.

Miller’s heart began to beat so fast and loudly that it registered on her microphone when it came time to shoot the scene in which Sophie learns of her husband’s infidelity. “The feeling that something’s about to come out that you have absolutely no control over, the anxiety of knowing that you’ve got one sleep before something intensely personal is made extremely public, that’s an agonizing state of affairs,” she said.

Sophie, on the other hand, handles her circumstance completely differently than Sienna Miller did. To say more would be to give too much away, but Sophie’s response to the reputational harm didn’t feel like an option for Miller at the time, and so Miller found it liberating, if not therapeutic, to act out Sophie’s story.

“There’s catharsis in all of it,” Sienna Miller said. “Anytime you get to go to work and cry, it sort of feels weirdly good.”

Watching Miller in the role, Vaughan noted the rawness of her performance, the seeming honesty of it. And something else. “I don’t know if I’m reading into that because of knowing what she’s experienced,” Vaughan said. “But I think there’s an anger to it, but a contained anger.”

When asked where that anger came from, Sienna Miller said, “At this point, at 40, I have had experiences that I’ve internalized and can use — betrayal and a frustration at how much I just accepted and did not push back on and how little self-esteem I had.”

She said it with a smile, but below it was something prickly. Miller’s ability to contain many emotional truths – wrath, despair, a wry humour — at the same time, according to creator Gibson, lends her performances a natural depth.

“She deserves every challenge,” Gibson said, “because she’s up to it.”

Miller now has a higher sense of self-worth. She claimed it took a couple of decades, a dozen more parts, and the birth of a child for her to figure out who she is now. Sophie continues her discussion about being underestimated and overvalued. She tells her adversary, “A lot of people think they know me. You think you know me. Trust me, you don’t.”

What does Sienna Miller wish people knew about her, especially those who have spent 20 years staring at her face in fashion magazines or checkout tabloids? Nothing.

“I’m less attached to really caring at this point,” she said. “I understand that I have much more substance than I was allowed to express as a person and always did. And I don’t know what to say about that. I mean, I’m very happy. I feel very grounded. I have a healthy child and I’m working still, and I survived a pretty extraordinary decade, and many people didn’t. So there’s a kind of quiet pride in that side of it.”

“What do I wish people knew?” she added. “I don’t.”

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