[noticed an overwhelming similarity between herself and his daughter,
Mia. Buell confirmed her daughter’s suspicion.
‘Though I have two sisters and a brother on my dad’s [Steven’s] side,
and three brothers on my stepdad’s [Todd’s] side, I didn’t grow up with
them; I was an only child – it was just me and my mum,’ she says. ‘I used
to dream about having a big family myself. I wanted a chaotic, interest-
ing, blended group of people.’ She certainly appears to have achieved
that, with her admirably functional, bohemian-blended brood. A few
hours before we meet, she arrived home from a two-week family holiday
in Maine, which not only included her, David and the four children they
have between them, but also David’s parents, and her mother and grand-
mother. Today, David and Gray, his 12-year-old son with his former wife,
the loo-roll heiress Davinia Taylor, are on their way back to the UK, so he
can spend time with his mother; Milo – who wan-
ders into the kitchen to say hello, all six-foot-one
of him, with sandy hair and a gentle smile – will
soon be leaving to spend time with his Dad, too.
When Gardner married Taylor in July 2003,
they were celebrated as one of the golden couples
of the hedonistic Primrose Hill set. Taylor,
the heiress to a £200m fortune, was best friends
with Kate Moss and Sadie Frost, and the couple
were regularly papped stepping out with a coterie
of famous friends on nights of gleeful abandon.
It is a glamorous world into which Tyler has also
been warmly embraced; Kate Moss and her boy-
friend Nikolai von Bismarck, James Brown and
Frost all attended Tyler’s 40th birthday: a more
grown-up, wholesome weekend of revelry held in the countryside.
She and Gardner have been engaged for four years. Is a wedding on the
cards? ‘I love being engaged, but I don’t really have a desire to get mar-
ried,’ she says. ‘I always felt like marriage should be more of a reward.’ For
what, I ask. ‘For surviving your relationship,’ she laughs. ‘I feel everyone’s
got it backwards.’ She sighs. ‘I feel like I belong to him and he belongs
to me. I’m so grateful that we’re both able to be our own people and fulfil
our dreams and support each other and create this family together. It’s
interesting doing everything a second time, bringing all of the things that
you’ve learned and then all the things you want to unlearn.’
I ask whether her own unconventional upbringing has made it easier
to avoid feeling hemmed in. ‘I don’t feel hemmed in by people’s expecta-
tions, or by anything in my life,’ she says. ‘I care about what people think- those that are close to me especially – but I just didn’t have those [rigid]
examples. My grandmother, my mother, my father, everyone in my life is
still living their life authentically, whatever the consequences of that are.
I think you have to live what your heart guides you towards, or else you’re
going to be in trouble, living an unfulfilled life.’
London, she has found, is family-oriented. ‘New York is very much a
career city and work, work, work; people have kids, but you don’t necessarily
see them, whereas in England everyone does things together. My agent
had a dinner recently, and her daughter was up with us the whole time
and finally fell asleep in the dog bed.’ She’s also found less pressure to
present an image of domestic perfection. ‘You’re allowed to be a mother
and be working and juggling everything in London.’
There’s one cultural difference she finds amusing and alarming.
‘The politeness, and that stiff upper lip. Milo finds it hilarious that every-
body’s okay with anything. They’ll be, like: “Oh, my tooth’s rotting, and
I can’t get an appointment for six months. Okay, I’m fine.” It’s such a
different country – it affects even our relationship dynamics,’ she
continues. ‘I remember the first time that David called me his missus. I
was like, “What? Excuse me? I’m not your missus.” You have to earn
that,’ she laughs.
At Tyler’s suggestion, we decamp upstairs to the cooler, airier through-
floor parlour. ‘It’s such a beautiful room... but we rarely go up there, so
it’s full of toys, and has turned into a bit of a toddler gym.’ The high-
ceilinged room, with its floor-to-ceiling windows, is indeed one of
contrasts; we settle on an elegant grey sofa, opposite an oversized white
fluffy armchair and matching footstool; across the room a white unicorn
rocking horse sits beside a pink trampoline and a red plastic tunnel tent.
Ad Astra represents a return to big-scale moviemaking. But Tyler has
not been neglecting her acting career, even while having two children in
rapid succession: she spent three seasons playing the enigmatic Meg Abbott
in the HBO drama The Leftovers, then, after arriving in London, took on
the most British of roles, as Anne Vaux in the BBC mini-series Gunpowder.
And she’s spent the past two years heavily powdered, strapped into corsets,
in a towering wig as Lady Isabella Fitzwilliam in
the ITV drama Harlots, a bawdy, visceral period
piece, set in the brothels of 18th-century London,
where one in five women is said to have worked
in the sex trade. The show is, as one critic put it,
‘a gift to feminists, sex workers and queers.’
‘I do think it’s ahead of its time,’ nods Tyler.
‘From the beginning, it’s been an all-female team
of writers and directors and producers.’ What
is, perhaps, less than liberating, are the role’s
sheer physical strains. Tyler pulls out her phone
to show me not just some of the elaborate steel
cages she wore, but also the raw wounds on her
body created by the tight corsets and costume
constructions. ‘I don’t think they were meant to
be worn for a whole 12-hour day of shooting on a TV show,’ she jokes.
After she modelled for a brief spell in her teens, Tyler’s acting career
took off with one of the most evocatively sensuous films of all time,
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty, in which she starred as Lucy
Harmon, travelling to Tuscany intent on losing her virginity and discov-
ering who her father is. ‘Nothing has ever compared to the experience of
making that film,’ she says. ‘I graduated from high school the day before
I went away, and turned 18 that summer. For my birthday, they roasted a
pig for me, in the middle of a Tuscan farmhouse, with peacocks on the
roof and bowls of cherries everywhere, and I was barefoot all the time.’
She went on to appear in blockbusters such as Armageddon, Onegin and
as the elf-maiden Arwen in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
There is the sound of doors opening and closing downstairs, and tiny,
excited cries of ‘Mummy’ (not ‘Mommy’). Tyler and I head down to say
hello. Lula, with her mop of brown curls, wraps her arms around her
mother’s neck as she crouches down, while Sailor hurls himself at her,
and grabs on to her as she topples backwards, both of them laughing
hard. ‘That’s his favourite thing to do right now, to knock me over,’ says a
delighted Tyler, from the floor.
Having worked in the industry for more than 25 years, Tyler is now
participating behind the camera too, developing a potential television
show of her own, though it’s early days yet. Whether it comes off or not,
there is, she says, a newfound fire in her belly. ‘I’m aware of time passing
in a different way than I have been before, and that makes me not want
to waste it. There’s that famous Confucius quote – my best friend said it
to me recently – that you have two lives and the second one begins when
you realise you only have one. I’m in that space right now.
‘Sometimes, you see people that are starting to give up or they feel like
they don’t have the opportunities or the choices, or they haven’t lived up
to the expectations they set for themselves by a certain age,’ she continues.
‘I’m in the opposite place right now. I’m like, “F**k that.” We don’t have
a lot of time. I have so much I want to do.’ (
Ad Astra is out 18 SeptemberTatler October 2019 tatler.com‘I remember the f irsttime David called mehis missus. I was like,“What? Excuse me?I’m not your missus.”You have to earn that’10-19WELLCoverstory.indd 110 16/08/2019 18:39
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