Three years ago, in the early days of her relocation
from New York to London, Liv Tyler worried
about developing a British accent. ‘My god-
mother lives in New Orleans, and whenever
I go to visit her, I’m speaking in a Southern
accent in two seconds,’ she tells me, in the
distinctive, seductively breathy, but definite-
ly American-accented voice for which she
has become famous. Her family, however, is
a different matter. In her west London household now, there’s a veritable
raft of accents. ‘Milo [her 14-year-old son by her rock star ex-husband
Royston Langdon] and I have American accents and then David [Gard-
ner, her fiancé, who grew up near Manchester] is northern. So he says
“bath”, and I say [a slightly twangier] “bath”, but the babies [Sailor, 4,
and Lula, 3] say “barth” – they have really British accents.’
The dialect of the two youngest is also ‘completely’ different from her
own, an encroaching assimilation she initially railed against. ‘For a long
time, every time they would say a word, I’d repeat it the American way.
So, they’d say, “bin” and I’d say, “trash can”. They’d say, “buggy” and I’d
say, “stroller”. I was constantly trying to remind them of the American
terms,’ she admits, with a shrug. ‘Now I just say it their way.’
In other ways, Tyler – whose father is Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler – has
adapted to British life with gusto. This year, she celebrated her 42nd
birthday at Glastonbury, helicoptering in with Victoria Beckham to
watch The Killers. ‘I’d never been to a music festival in my life before I
first went to Glastonbury two years ago,’ she confesses. ‘I think, being the
daughter of a rock star, I was used to being on the other side, where it was
kind of scary and chaotic. So that’s been a whole new thing for me and I
really enjoy it. Even if you just stay in London, there’s so much good
music. All the festivals in Hyde Park are amazing.’
The £11.5m house she and Gardner have is around the corner from
the Beckhams in Notting Hill and she considers the couple to be ‘new
friends’. Her old friends, meanwhile, number plenty of Britons, includ-
ing Kate Moss, whom she met when she was 15 (and who introduced her
and Gardner), and her ‘oldest best friend’ Lucie de la Falaise, the model
niece of Yves Saint Laurent’s muse, Loulou de la Falaise. ‘She and Marlon
[Lucie’s husband, the son of the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards and
Anita Pallenberg] and I met at the same time in New York.’ The pair now
live in the English countryside with their children. ‘Having them there
gave me a feeling of family, so I didn’t feel alone
in a new place,’ says Tyler.
One of the most jarring aspects of life in London
was her discovery of a very different social stratifi-
cation. ‘As an American, I find the [British] class
system really oppressive. We’re raised that anyone
can be anything they want; if you work hard at
something, apply yourself, you can come from
nothing and have everything. You can also have
everything and go to nothing,’ she notes.
Tyler’s many observations on the Anglo-
American cultural divide are, today, being told in
the kitchen of the five-storey brownstone in New
York City’s West Village which she bought when
she was only 23. In black leggings and a volumi-
nous Victorian-style black smock, she’s beetling about the kitchen,
making coffee and frothing oat milk for us.
On the flip side of the social stratification system, she continues excitedly,
‘I got to go to a royal wedding.’ Along with a glamorous guest list that
included Moss, Naomi Campbell and Cara Delevingne, last autumn Tyler
and Gardner attended Princess Eugenie’s wedding to Jack Brooksbank.
‘Sitting in the church was my favourite part of the whole experience – theway the light came through the windows and the stained glass, the music,
the acoustics... I don’t even have the words to describe how magical it
was,’ she swoons. ‘And then the protocol of who came in where and
went out where, and where we were sitting and how to behave – it was so
interesting. And then, once it was over and we got into the party, it was
very relaxed and very fun and very playful. Suddenly, everything got very
loose and not at all formal.’
Through Gardner, who is a friend of Princess Eugenie’s, she has met
the Yorks on numerous occasions, though, she admits, ‘I don’t know
what any of it [their titles] means, really. We have friends who are lords
and ladies, von this and von that. I don’t fully understand. But I love
learning the history of it all.’
Tyler doesn’t know if she’ll keep her house in New York, now the fam-
ily is settled in London. There are so many happy memories, and she’s a
self-confessed nostalgic. ‘I find it hard to let things go. I’m like a hermit
crab – I would like to carry everything with me, always, on my back.’
The first time Tyler and I met, in the spring of 2014, she was a single
mother to Milo, then nine (though co-parenting amicably with his
father) and was open about her desire to have more children. ‘I’m 100
per cent planning on it, but the clock is ticking,’ she said. ‘If the stork
could just drop it off on my roof, I’d be so happy – I’d have, like, 20.’
Though she’d not yet gone public about her relationship with Gardner,
David Beckham’s best friend and manager, she was soon manifesting
hard; their son, Sailor, was born in February the following year, and
daughter Lula in July 2016. Tyler clearly is not a woman wont to let the
grass grow under her feet. Though when it comes to family and work she
freely admits that the juggle is real. ‘Every day, it’s like this giant jigsaw
puzzle,’ she says. ‘Days go by where I feel like I don’t even breathe.’
The latest ball in the air is her first major film release in more than five
years, James Gray’s space drama, Ad Astra, in which she stars with Brad
Pitt. ‘It was really nice for me to do a film again,’ she says. ‘I love TV;
TV’s been kind to me in the past few years and I’ve found some characters
that I really like, but I think in my heart of hearts, I really love making
films.’ Liv has known the film’s writer and director, Gray, who is most
celebrated for Little Odessa and We Own the Night, for 20 years. ‘And his
is a kind of filmmaking that’s so rare, it’s so definitive and poetic, and
every shot means something – it takes your breath away,’ she says, in awe.
That, however, is as much as she is willing to give away about the film
itself. ‘I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about it,’ she says, suddenly coy.
‘I think you’re supposed to let the film come out
and let it speak for itself. It’s a film that...’ she
tails off.
It’s no secret, though, that she plays the love
interest of Pitt’s astronaut character, who is sent
on a mission to space to find his father (played by
Tommy Lee Jones), who has been presumed
dead for many years, but may, in fact, be alive.
‘Brad is such a good actor,’ she says. ‘Of course,
I knew that beforehand, but when you’re actually
with him in the room and you’re acting with
him, it’s just amazing. His presence is so powerful
and he’s very kind and generous and giving.
Sometimes actors can be in their own bubble,
but he’s really not that way at all.’
While Tyler’s acting career spans three decades, her roots are the stuff
of rock legend. Raised by her mother, the model and groupie Bebe Buell
(who was the inspiration for Liv’s old friend Kate Hudson’s character in
Almost Famous, and whose own close friends included Mick Jagger and
John Lennon), as a child Liv believed her father to be musician Todd
Rundgren, her mother’s on-off partner. Backstage at an Aerosmith con-
cert, a 10-year-old Liv met Steven Tyler for the first time and ]Tatler October 2019 tatler.com‘We have friends whoare lords and ladies,von this and that. Idon’t fully understand.But I love learningthe history of it all’10-19WELLCoverstory.indd 106 16/08/2019 18:39
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