Love scenes with Luther? Yes please! Sienna Guillory quit a glittering film career in LA for the sake of her twin toddlers. Now she's in bed with our dishiest TV detective

By Nicole Lampert for the Daily Mail

Published: 17:31 EDT, 28 June 2013 | Updated: 17:31 EDT, 28 June 2013

Oh crumbs! I’ve only been chatting to new Luther star Sienna Guillory for a few seconds, but already she’s in tears. She’s someone, she admits, who has ‘emotional Tourette’s’.

It’s refreshing and endearing, but in the refined confines of the library in the trendy hotel where we meet, it can be a touch disconcerting.

The tears are over her two-year-old twin girls. It’s clear Sienna adores them, but it’s also clear she’s struggling.

We’re introduced as I’m finishing a phone call trying to juggle my own childcare. She empathises and I say it must be even harder with twins.

Sienna Guillory quit a glittering film career in LA for the sake of her twin toddlers. Now she's in bed with our dishiest TV detective

That’s when her eyes start watering. ‘Why doesn’t anyone tell you how hard it is?’ she asks, struggling to talk. ‘Before you have children you think parenting is about your capacity for love and you say, “I can do that.”

‘Then you have two at once and you feel like they both need you all the time, and it always feels like you’re neglecting one; it just breaks your heart.’ She admits that a few days earlier she’d been to see the doctor for advice.

‘I said, “Where am I supposed to go for help?” He looked at me like I was mad.’ Help is one reason why Sienna, 38, and her actor husband of ten years Enzo Cilenti, also 38, returned to London from LA where she’d built a successful film career. ‘I needed my mum,’ she says, more tears falling.

Appearances can certainly be deceptive.

From the outside, Sienna’s the cool-as- ice blonde bombshell who found fame in Jilly Cooper’s Riders, became a top model, was a tabloid darling when she dated Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels star Nick Moran, and then moved to LA where she played a string of tough girls including warrior Jill Valentine in the hit Resident Evil series. 

She’s certainly beautiful, but surprisingly low on confidence.

After having her girls, Valentina and Lucia, she was terrified she’d never work again. Instead, she had just a few weeks after the birth to get super-fit for the most recent Resident Evil film, Retribution. ‘I was going up against Milla Jovovich – a supermodel in a catsuit,’ she says. ‘I worked out for three hours in the morning and an hour at night.’

Ironically, the upheaval in her domestic life meant she felt happier than she’d ever been on set. ‘I’d always felt everyone must be better at this than I am. But after I became a mum I realised work was heaven – I’m good at it. It’s a juxtaposition with the blithering wreck I am at home, where I don’t know what I’m doing but I’m team leader. I’m not good at that.’

Sienna says it was a joy to work with Luther's lead Idris Elba

Filming the movie in Toronto also made her realise she wanted to get back to Britain. ‘You can walk to the shops rather than driving,’ she says.

‘I missed British newspapers and I didn’t want my children to grow up in a place where they use the term Mexican in a pejorative way, which happens in LA.’

Coming back was a risk – ‘I was terrified people would have forgotten me’ – but almost immediately she got the script for Luther, to play the maverick cop’s love interest Mary Day. ‘It’s easier to play characters that are different to you; with Jill Valentine I was all-powerful. With Mary I had to be really honest; she’s got emotional Tourette’s like me. Playing her was an emotional ride.’

Sienna says it was a joy to work with Luther’s lead Idris Elba.

‘He’s amazing,’ she gushes. ‘He’s really big, and I never knew what he was going to do next; pick me up or knock me over. The love scenes were a perk,’ she adds. ‘It was much nicer kissing him than Antonio Banderas, who told me I was a terrible kisser in front of the whole crew [on 2011’s The Big Bang].’

The daughter of model Tina Thompson and American/Cuban folk guitarist Isaac Guillory, Sienna was always a bit different to the Home Counties farmers’ daughters at her boarding school and was bullied. Acting became her release, partly inspired by Helen Mirren, who once lived in a commune with Sienna’s mother.

‘She was a real role model for me. She’s hypnotic, extraordinary, funny, vivacious and brilliant. She’s superhuman; everything you want to be and more.’

Now Sienna’s finally reaching a place – and an age – where she’s happy just being herself.

‘I’ve always wanted to be older as I think it’s all right to be a little bit odd when you’re out of your 20s,’ she muses. She is odd – but in a rather lovely way.

Luther, Tuesday, 9pm, BBC1.