After lunch, we head to pick up Marlowe, who is waiting at the entrance when we pull up. “She’s going to scowl at me because I’m late,” Miller says. “I mean, she has all the power in our dynamic.” Miller wanted more children for a long time, she tells me. “I felt so bad that Marlowe didn’t have a little partner in crime,” she says, “so I became that for her. I think I tried to compensate for every bit that she was lacking.”
When we arrive back at the house, Green is sitting on the sofa, working on his laptop, a rangy, comfortable figure. Tall and dark-haired, he will soon appear in the final season of The Crown as Rupert Finch, a classmate of Prince William’s, and has just finished filming a Civil War drama for Paramount, The Gray House (another Costner-connected production). Today he’s waiting to meet a window-box lady; his parents have given her services to the couple as a housewarming gift.
Miller and I descend to the lower-level kitchen so she can prepare dinner. She quickly dices onion, carrots, and celery for a chicken to rest on as it roasts, while I am put to work peeling potatoes. Cauliflower is blanched on the stove, while she grates a thick block of cheddar. As she moves swiftly round the kitchen, she tells me about the start of their relationship. There was a kiss right when they met, and then she retreated. “I was like, This is absurd. This will not go anywhere,” she says. “And then he worked hard to persuade me to go out for a drink with him.” She asked her good friend Emily Blunt to tag along on one of their early dates in New York—an unnecessary wingwoman, as Blunt now tells it: “When I got there, it was so beautiful between them. I just gave her a hug and went, ‘I’m going to slip away.’ ” Miller and Green both came down with covid at the same time, so they sent Marlowe to live with Sturridge and moved in together for the week, an experience that “sort of fast-tracked intimacy.”
“I see so much of her in him,” says Blunt of Green, “in that free-spirited, curious, guileless thing that he has.He’s the kind of guy you could just bring anywhere, and everyone would love him.” Her friend also notes that Sienna always wanted another child. “We’ve talked about it for years,” says Blunt. “She just needed the right person, and I really see that in him.”
Green comes downstairs to report on the window-box lady’s assessment, and though I am meant to be interviewing his girlfriend, we fall into an easy conversation that swings between the NBA (he and Miller were semiregular Knicks fans at Madison Square Garden), directors he might like to work with (he was watching clips on his laptop), the Premier League (he and Miller support Chelsea), and US politics (his cousin is Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin, who represents the 7th District of Michigan). He was raised by parents who made their careers in the art world; his grandfather started London’s Richard Green gallery. The oldest of three boys, he rebuffed the pressure put on him by his parents to lead by example. “I was like, I don’t want to do the right thing,” he says. Green attended Tisch at New York University for a year before dropping out and enrolling in the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York. Green and Miller together are, in fact, such engaging conversationalists that I feel I could linger for hours. But the chicken is now in the oven, and Marlowe, having finished her homework with Sturridge, who had stopped by to help her, has descended in a fluffy pink terrycloth robe and would appreciate her mother’s attention. It’s time to head out.
A few days later, before Miller meets with her new ob-gyn, we sit down for lunch at St. John in Marylebone. Miller shows me a picture of a crib she had screenshotted and sent to Green’s mother; it’s a beautiful wicker structure with a floaty muslin canopy, exactly what you might imagine boho queen Sienna Miller would pick for her newborn daughter. As Green’s mother had duly reminded her, though, this is not a crib for an infant. Such is the rhythm of parenting young children: a quixotic vision, and then a reality check.
Sophie Anderson, a UK-based writer, is your guide to the latest trends, viral sensations, and internet phenomena. With a finger on the pulse of digital culture, she explores what’s trending across social media and pop culture, keeping readers in the know about the latest online sensations.
