The couple scoffs at the allegations made by the New York Post that Bruce had handpicked Emma during casting for his 2007 film Perfect Stranger because he was single and looking around. While Emma did indeed score a small role in the movie, she and Bruce say they were hardly, well, strangers by that point, having known each other prior to the film’s production. Emma has since concluded that acting is not her thing—something that her husband finds “refreshing.”
Instead, she plans to stick to modeling, a profession in which she’s enjoyed success through campaigns for Gap and Victoria’s Secret, among other brands. “She’s made her own money,” says her agent of 10 years, Faith Kates, the head of Next Management. “Clients adore her and are unbelievably loyal because she’s really a lady—she says ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ They’ll work with her for five and six years running, which is unheard of in our business.”
A hyper-responsible early riser who grew up mainly in California before moving to Paris at age 18, Emma was not pleased to see herself described in the press as a serial celebrity dater (she was once linked to Formula One owner and millionaire Flavio Briatore) after marrying Bruce, but true to her reticent nature, she refuses to talk about past relationships. That doesn’t stop Kates from addressing the issue. “Let me tell you something: Every guy in New York calls for these girls,” she says, referring to the rich and famous men who ask modeling agencies to set them up on dates—a practice, she intimates, that many of the girls are amenable to. “But she’s not that girl.” Indeed, in person, Emma comes off more like a consummate professional than a partying social climber. “The road I went down in modeling was a very commercial one because I wanted to make money, pay my mortgages and take care of myself and my mother,” she says. “And then, every now and again, I’ll get into something a bit more artsy, creative—like this shoot for W—and it kind of restores my love for my job.”
Her husband’s approach to his work is quite similar. Though his bread and butter is explosion-laden action flicks, he repeatedly emphasizes that he gets more pleasure from doing edgier fare like Pulp Fiction, 12 Monkeys and The Sixth Sense. “We have so many things in common,” Emma says. “We’re self-made, we came from the same background, and we went to work and became self-sufficient.” Bruce got a taste of his wife’s line of work on the W shoot, which ended up with him in some, uh, compromising positions. “Oh, it was awkward,” he says with a bashful laugh. “We did stuff that I know a lot of other actors would not have done. Had I done it with another model, I don’t know that I would have been as into it.”
