The 2016 movie Sienna Miller “embarrassingly” auditioned for: “The stupidest voice”
While her private life might have captivated the nation during the 2000s, Sienna Miller should be remembered for her many early performances in her native England, which include Layer Cake and Factory Girl, before she broke out in Hollywood with GI Joe: Rise of Cobra.
After a brief sabbatical from the screen, she returned in 2012 and has found further success, but she hasn’t always been able to land the gigs she would like.
While she turned down the chance to re-team with Daniel Craig because she didn’t want to be typecast as a Bond girl, earlier in her career, she screen tested alongside Ben Affleck for a movie called Paycheck, but ultimately lost out to Uma Thurman, and she actually filmed scenes for the 2015 gangster flick Black Mass, but they were left out of the finished product.
When it comes to one failed audition, however, the British icon has no one to blame but herself, as she revealed on an episode of Late Night with Seth Meyers, that she wanted to lend her voice to the 2016 animated kids movie Trolls, so turn to her then-three-year-old daughter, Marlowe, for help, which might not have been the best idea in hindsight.
“I was like, ‘Ooh, Trolls! OK, I’m gonna do something unique’, which was the stupidest voice…which [Marlowe], at three, thought was amazing,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘I crushed it’. Sent it off and didn’t get it. But I’m sure that there will be a tape circulating around that studio of the ridiculous troll voice that I thought was appropriate.”
Released in 2016, Trolls has nothing to do with sweaty losers who bully people online and instead stars Anna Kendrick as a small glittery creature based on the famous ‘troll doll’ toy line. Apart from its bright colours and high-energy performances, the film’s main appeal lies in its use of licensed music, with the soundtrack full of songs from the likes of Cyndi Lauper, Diana Ross, and Justin Timberlake, who also lends his voice to one of the characters.
It was ridiculously successful and has spawned two sequels, World Tour and Band Together, but Miller didn’t reveal who got the part she auditioned for. There’s a chance it could have been Kendrick, but it seems unlikely she would have gone for the main part, and other prominent female trolls are voiced by Zooey Deschanel, Christine Baranski, and Gwen Stefani, so it could have been any of them. In the end, however, Miller was happy to admit defeat once she’d actually seen the film.
“She just did a great, kind of normal voice,” she continued, “I was really off the mark… I wanted to be that troll”.
Despite being a big music fan, Miller has never been in a movie that required her to sing, so she might have been entirely unsuitable for Trolls, and while she could have the singing voice of an angel, the speaking voice she chose for her audition meant that it didn’t matter either way.
