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Take a girl like you
By Alison Roberts Last updated at 00:00am on 04.09.00I am sitting in a well-known Soho club with Sienna Guillory, a young actress and model who used to wait on these very tables. Noticing how politely she addresses our own waiter, I ask her whether she found the bus-girl experience a little traumatic. "I loved it," she says, unequivocally. "Supporting my acting habit with waitressing was probably the most useful thing I've done. Though it was a bit of an eye-opener."
In particular, she loved all the food Bruce the chef made her taste, since acting was all about not eating and being able to fit into tight costume-drama corsets. She loved cycling home down Oxford Street at 3am, tipsy. There's a part of her, she says, that wouldn't mind being a waitress even now, since she's sometimes happiest fading into the background; being a "little grey rabbit".
This is difficult when you look like Sienna Guillory, however. In the dark of the upstairs bar, make-up-less, she could indeed pass for an ultra-slim, averagely pretty teenager, but downstairs in the full daylight, her delicate bone structure and large eyes are suddenly illuminated - and you can see exactly why Select model agency took her onto their books when she accompanied a ballerina friend to an interview four years ago. She was 21 then: her CV listed parts in lots of short films plus Jilly Cooper's Riders on TV, and she had "a face full of acne". Select paid for a visit to a Harley Street skin specialist and sent her along to castings with lots of 14-year-olds. "I think the agency was more surprised than I was at how much work I got," she says.
Three years later, waitressing long forgotten, she fronted a Hugo Boss perfume campaign and rented an apartment in New York to accompany her "slimy" basement flat in Ladbroke Grove. Her long-term boyfriend Nick Moran (now ex-boyfriend), meanwhile, was newly famous, having played the chirpy card-shark lead in Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Sienna started appearing in gossip columns, described not as an actress but as a model. The tabloids hooked onto Moran.
"We both started out making student films and both of us swore we'd never sell out," she says, meaning it. "Then Lock Stock came around for him, and I was off being a tart in Milan, or wherever - and it was suddenly, hang on a minute! What are we doing?"
But that's not "selling out", I say. That's being successful. She thinks for a minute, lights another Natural Spirit cigarette. "It was really interesting watching what happened to Nick from my different perspective, being mousy in the corner and trying to help him through it all. Every time we went out, everyone wanted to talk to him, but no one listened to a word he had to say, and everyone assumed that because he didn't speak posh, he was thick. He's not. He's a very, very intelligent person. All that tabloid stuff about him, about us, it was as if it was someone else."
They split up just as Sienna's acting career began to take off, and it was Jason Donovan, with whom she stars in a movie called Sorted, released next month, who helped her "see the bigger picture" when things got difficult. But she and Moran remain good friends: "We always were mates," she says.
This year, at 25, Guillory decided she needed a new start (she says that some of her peers, and she means model peers I think, are already lying about their age: "I got worried for a while that all casting directors were looking for was 18-year-olds, but f*** it, that's their problem.") She got herself a new flat in Little Venice - a "big, airy, girly flat" - and a new boyfriend called Enzo, whose name she whispers coyly, and a serious part in a serious BBC drama, the adaptation of Kingsley Amis's Take a Girl Like You, which screens this autumn. She doesn't go to those swish parties any more, and good for her.
"It's fun dressing up, but then you get there and everybody seems bored." Sienna would rather be riding her horse in Norfolk, where her parents live, but she's still under insurance contracts for various modelling jobs and isn't allowed to, in case she breaks her leg or damages her valuable face.
In fact, she's been around actors and models and "cool people" pretty much all her life. She grew up in Fulham, but moved to Norfolk when she was 11, where the headmaster at school was Jude Law's dad. Her mum was also briefly a model, a "hippie" who'd make Sienna's clothes for her, and her father is a Cuban guitarist called Isaac Guillory who has his own record label and refuses to get involved in the "music industry". Sienna was raised in a household of strong personalities and convictions, she says. Helen Mirren is a good family friend and a role model, someone she looked to at the very beginning, when she decided to act.
"I always wanted to do boys' parts," she says. "Something difficult, a crack addict maybe. Now I get asked to do films, and I say: 'well, what's the story?' And they say: 'well, there's this boy'." She rolls her eyes. "The girl is always an afterthought, some ditzy blonde who's there to look pretty and add a bit of glam."
Sienna fought against this for a while - and then made Sorted, in which she plays Sunny, a ditzy blonde who's there to look pretty and add a bit of glam. Guillory acknowledges this mini-defeat, and pulls an I'm-about-to-vomit face. "I'm an actress and I try to be professional," she says. "I wouldn't have done it when I was 18, but this is a good, pacy film." She has to say that, of course: but it's not quite true. Sorted is a strange and bad film set in the London club/drugs world. Sienna acquits herself well acting-wise, but this might be a movie she prefers to forget later in her career.
Never mind. The BBC suits are so confident about Andrew Davies's adaptation of Take a Girl Like You, in which Sienna plays the lead - schoolteacher Jenny Bunn - they're heading their autumn schedules with it. It's proper British costume drama and it'll bring its own, gentler kind of BBC-sponsored fame. Sienna is a bit nervous about this - she's a bit nervous about the whole fame thing, having seen Moran go through it - but I think she'll handle it. A week after we meet, she writes me a long, sweet and eloquent letter clarifying what she said in the interview. She describes what her former agent used to tell her, before she left him for the high-profile agency ICM. He said: "Don't try and talk to everyone, just say your lines and nobody'll find out what a nutter you are."
"Best advice I ever had," writes Sienna.
? Sorted is released on 6 October.
