Sienna Miller is 41 and pregnant. Her instinct is to joke about it.

There's a self assuredness in Sienna Miller's new Vogue cover story.

The 41-year-old actor speaks about overcoming the need to prove herself with only serious, 'important' roles. Her friends tell stories of her pushing back against paparazzi shouting rude things. She pushes back at the suggestion that her younger partner, 27-year-old partner Oli Green, may want to be with someone younger one day, by simply stating, "For Oli, it is real that I might want to be with someone older".

But there is one part where Miller admits she's still has an insecurity to work through.

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Miller is 28 weeks pregnant with her second child, and her first with Green. She is already a mother to 11-year-old Marlowe, who she co-parents with actor Tom Sturridge.

"I'd love to get to a point where I didn't feel the need to make a joke of my being older and having a baby, to show I'm in on the joke," she said.

Besides that, Miller says she's up for surrendering to the process this time around, in a way that she wasn't when pregnant with Marlowe.

Back then, she had her heart set on a "natural" home birth. Instead, she was induced at the hospital and after 27 hours of labour, delivered via emergency C-section.

"It was so essential in my mind that I got it 'right.' And so emblematic of the kind of mother I would be that I didn't," she told Vogue. "But I know in retrospect that was just the demons of new motherhood."

"[This time] I just don't think I'll put that pressure on myself."

Miller, still a heavy fixture of British tabloids especially, has faced scrutiny for her relationship, of course, as well as for baring her stomach. In September, she delivered one of the most-talked about looks of the night when she arrived at the Vogue World event in a two-piece Schiaparelli outfit that bare her pregnant stomach.

Of the outfit, she admitted to being nervous about it.

"But once I had it on, everything else felt boring. I was like, I'll have that photo for the rest of my baby's life. It's kind of fascinating to fight your own prejudice against yourself. I'm constantly doing that."

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There's less to fight against when it comes to her and Green's 14-year age-gap.

Her relationships, especially with Jude Law in the 2000s and a 2008 affair with actor and DJ Balthazar Getty, were poured over in newspapers, on homepages and even in court when she gave evidence during Britain's Leveson Inquiry investigating the practices of British media.

Miller was hesitant to date Green at first, even dragging friend Emily Blunt along to one of her early dates. But then she and Green contracted Covid at the same time and isolated together. She called it "fast-tracked intimacy".

"I don't think you can legislate on matters of the heart. I certainly have never been able to," Miller said.

At 41, Miller may be pregnant, preparing for a new chapter and embracing another career peak. But she's also not running from her past, which, as documented by every tabloid, involved heartbreak, pain and being relentlessly pursued by men with cameras.

Her current attitude is best summed up by her reflection on a 2007 interview with The Guardian, which became infamous at the time for a series of not-exactly-PR-friendly quotes, like how magic mushrooms would be her 'drug of choice' and the many rude (but funny) names she and her friends had brainstormed for American cities. Massivetwoshits is Massachusetts, for example.

At the time of publication, all it did was fan the already brutal media circus surrounding her, and she was so upset by it she called up the writer, Simon Hattenstone.

"He said, 'I'm sorry that you're upset, but I think when you are older, you are going to look back on this and love this article. It'll be a real capsule of who you were at that moment.' And actually I did many years later go back and read it, and I was like, She's great."

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Feature image: Getty.