Initially, Lindsay Lohan was cast in the role that Sienna Miller would eventually fill, as the feisty wife of poet Dylan Thomas in John Maybury's new film, The Edge of Love. Sienna Miller recently sat down to talk specifics on The Edge of Love, G.I. Joe, and how she and Keira Knightley indulge their "nerdy" sides.

How did you find out you'd be playing Caitlin Thomas in The Edge of Love?

I was on holiday in Mexico and John Maybury, the director, who is a friend, phoned me up and said, 'Get out of the sun.' And I was like, 'I will not get out of the sun. I deserve this holiday.' And he said, 'No, you're coming back to be in my '40s film, The Edge of Love, which is set in London, and it won't work if you've got a tan.' So I got on the next plane, flew back and had practically no time to get prepared.

You're known for your role in Factory Girl, and in The Edge of Love, you chose another role where you're playing a real person, why is that?

With Factory Girl I had 6 months to prepare and that was fantastic. There's so much research you can do if you're playing someone who actually existed. [Because of Lohan's departure] I came on to this two weeks before we were shooting. I had no time whatsoever. There's something really great about playing someone who existed, for the history and the knowledge you can dip into, and she was a pretty fascinating character. [There was] less pressure than Edie, since most people don't know much about Caitlin Thomas.

Along with that, did you feel any kind of self-consciousness at all, in approaching the role?

From the start we weren't making a bio pic and that was made very clear. We kind of wanted to focus on the relationships between these people, with the backdrop of the war and how people react, since this did really happen in their lives. I spoke to Dylan Thomas' daughter Aeronwy. She says I'm a lot nicer than her mother was. I think Caitlin was pretty feisty and I think she comes across a little less tough than she was in real life.

What was the most difficult part of the role, for you to get right?

The transition was quite hard, to go from having this tough exterior and being quite a feisty person to falling apart, it's always challenging emotionally to do that, and the scenes where I'm breaking down, that was probably the most challenging part. John Maybury the director was a great friend, so it never felt like I was "drowning" in any way.

In your opinion, what does exist at the "edge of love?"

I think love is a really hard thing to define. I think it's multifaceted. What's interesting about this film is you could take these characters, put them in any era, and their responses to the situation would be the same. I'm not sure what happens at the edge of love -- I think probably a lack of intelligence. People on the edge of love go with their heart and not their head.

How are you choosing your parts at this point, from period pieces such as this to big-scale stuff like G.I. Joe?

As far as G.I. Joe, I wanted to do something where I wasn't addicted to heroin or having a breakdown, or dying at the end. Also I think my parents were like "Please, stop doing these films. You're killing us!" It's a whole different world, a huge budget, a huge crew, with things blowing up around you all the time. I think initially I was just completely overwhelmed. I'd never done fight training much less gone to the gym, so this was a while new experience. But once I kind of realized what I was doing, it was really fun to make a movie that was just pure entertainment, and a completely different style of acting, really performing in a different way. That variety is really exciting.

What kind of bonding happened on The Edge of Love set between you and Keira Knightley?

We were friends before we did the film, and we became even closer, and to this day, she's one of my closest friends. Because it was such an intense relationship between these two women [in the film], it's really important that we did get along, and really lucky that we did. She's so professional, and ridiculously mature for her age, I'm 12 in comparison. We're quite nerdy. We talk about books and we play cards, and do The Guardian crossword. We're all living together in this big house in Wales, walking around in our pajamas and going on walks. She's learning the flute; I'm learning piano. We really are quite nerdy.

When you do talk, what sorts of things do you talk about?

We keep ourselves afloat if things happen in the press that are hard to deal with, or the awful temptation to Google yourself comes up, and just being mortified about what people write about you. She'll phone me up and say, "I'm thinking about doing it" and I'm like "I am too ... don't do it, don't do it!" and we'll kind of talk each other out of it. It's hard sometimes to not want to know what people are saying behind your back and to ignore certain things that are being written.

You mentioned enjoying books with Keira, what sorts of books and films do the two of you enjoy?

I'm reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I'm enjoying very much, which is one of the most fantastic books I've ever read. Lately, I re-read On the Road [by Jack Kerouac]. I'm kind of quite into the beat poets, Bukowski's Ham on Rye I've got lined up to read. I'm trying to go back and do some of the classics, and as far as films go, I just saw this amazing film called Old Boy. It's one of the most amazing films. It's disturbing and fantastic.

Recommend (0)

|  Comments (0)

|  Email

|  Share

Share  Facebook Digg del.icio.us