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The last time I met with Amanda Seyfried, it was a boiling-hot day in the summer of 2022, and she had just been nominated for an Emmy for her performance as Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout, which she would go on to win. Between that and her 2021 Oscar nomination for her performance in Mank, it was clear her career was moving up to the next level. It wouldn’t be surprising if that kind of hype went to anyone’s head.
I’m pleased to report that Seyfried is exactly the same person she was three years prior when we meet again for her Who What Wear cover interview on a rainy October day in Brooklyn: immediately warm and chatty. She has a knitting project jammed inside an oversize and overstuffed Givenchy bag and is familiar in a way that makes you feel you’ve been friends for years. There is not an ounce of diva behavior to be found.
“To have any kind of spotlight on you for any particular reason in this awards realm is always helpful in terms of awareness. It was a reminder to people that I can show up and do good work,” she says of her two big award moments, tugging the sleeves of her black polo shirt over her hands. “But if you don’t keep working hard, doing what you love, but also making interesting choices, it fades. It all fades. The day after the Oscars clock strikes midnight, people already start talking about the next year.”
Well, that combination of hard work and interesting choices (and an undeniable talent) has landed Seyfried squarely back in the Oscars conversation. She stars in The Testament of Ann Lee, a historical drama from Mona Fastvold set to hit theaters at Christmas, in which she plays the titular founder of the Shaker movement through three decades of her life. It’s a role that required a lot of Seyfried: an 18th-century Manchurian accent, singing and dancing (while not exactly a musical in the traditional sense, The Testament of Ann Lee features a handful of stunning musical numbers), intense physicality, and historical costumes. Even the most fearless actors might be scared off by that kind of pressure, but for Seyfried, that was part of the appeal.
“It all adds up to this other person that is still you, very much you, but there’s a mountain on top of you, and this mountain has to be believable as a person,” she explains. “It was so fucking daunting, but it was like, ‘This is why these are the things that you choose.’ I feel like I have to keep choosing things that terrify me—within reason, right? I’m not gonna jump off a cliff or jump out of an airplane, but I need to sink my teeth into something that is really scary because I know I can do it, and I know I’ll be better for it.”
Fastvold had worked with Seyfried on both The Crowded Room and this year’s Peacock drama series Long Bright River, and the two had developed both an excellent working relationship and a close friendship, which came in clutch during the filming of The Testament of Ann Lee. When their families weren’t in town, Seyfried and Fastvold roomed together. Working with a tight indie-movie budget meant making the most of their time shooting in Budapest. Again, no diva behavior here.
“Amanda’s just a team player. That’s who she is, something that comes very easy to her,” Fastvold says over the phone. “When she’s not shooting, she’s working on her farm, feeding animals, doing that kind of work. She’s the opposite of whatever cliché of a movie star is out there.”
The director also raved about Seyfried’s ability to connect with her costars, whether they were a day player or a seasoned actor. “She’s the most present and the most unafraid performer,” Fastvold says. “She’s so excited to just look into that other performer’s eyes and take whatever they’re giving to her and send it back.”
(Image credit: Future)
No wonder Seyfried’s performance earned a 15-minute standing ovation at the Venice premiere of The Testament of Ann Lee. She’s electric as Ann Lee, an unstoppable force through tragic losses and transatlantic voyages. Fastvold says they only finalized the edits mere weeks before Venice, a whirlwind finish to a deeply emotional journey for everyone involved—which is why, when the lights went up at the end, the audience found Seyfried weeping.
“I don’t know if it’s because me, Amanda, went through so much during that movie or if it’s just that it was really a very effective movie, but I just hysterically cried at Venice,” she says. “I don’t think I can actually take myself out of that experience like I normally can when I watch things.”
“But I watched The Housemaid recently, and I was like, ‘This is epic,'” she adds. “This is the most fun movie ever.”
Sitting just about as far on the opposite end of the cinematic experience as you can get from The Testament of Ann Lee, The Housemaid is Seyfried’s second film set to debut in December. It’s a thriller directed by Paul Feig, a master of the genre—all pulpy, exhilarating fun. She stars as Nina Winchester, a seemingly perfect housewife hiding a number of secrets that required Seyfried to walk a very slippery tightrope, changing shape from scene to scene. It’s hard to talk about how masterful her performance is without spoiling anything, and everyone involved with the movie is deeply passionate about preserving that experience for moviegoers, despite the fact that it’s an adaptation of Freida McFadden’s best-selling novel.
“Freida McFadden said this herself: She thinks the movie is better than the book,” Seyfried says proudly. “So many people are like, ‘I’m gonna read it before it comes out.’ Don’t do that because you’re gonna miss the hilarity of the twist! We want people screaming in the theaters.”
And you will be. By the end of my screening, the entire audience was hooting and hollering at everything happening on-screen.
Feig has wanted to work with Seyfried for a while now, having met her for a coffee in New York over a decade ago. “She was somebody I wanted to have in a movie. She had the right feel and personality, openness, and fun that I always look for,” he explains over the phone. It was just a question of having the right role materialize. When he signed on for The Housemaid, Sydney Sweeney was already attached as Millie, the titular housemaid hiding a few secrets of her own, and they were both excited by the idea of Seyfried. Feig had seen her work in The Dropout, and it cemented his belief that she could pull off the kind of shape-shifting required to play Nina.
I can’t give any spoilers, but there’s a moment in the movie that so critically hinges on Seyfried’s performance that the entire tension of the plot might’ve deflated in the hands of a less capable actor. (Sorry to be a tease on this, but trust me. You’ll know it when you see it in the movie.)
“That is completely performance dependent—there is no way to manipulate that performance in editing or anything. You have to have her pull it off,” Feig gushes when I mention it in conversation. “That’s just pure Amanda. We shot probably three or four takes of that, and each time, the hair raised up on the back of my neck from how great it was. She’s a rock star—I’m telling you.”
(Image credit: Future)
Once again, the conversation moves into how game Seyfried was to make every moment in the movie absolutely perfect. There’s a scene that required Nina to appear incredibly disheveled, so she collaborated with the film’s makeup artist to perfect the look: lipstick smeared across her face, blush too strong and too big, stray hairs standing up everywhere. “She came on set like that, and I’m just like, ‘Boy, you’re my hero,'” Feig says with a laugh.
Despite how tense her scenes with Sweeney were, there was no method acting on the Housemaid set. “Amanda was incredibly collaborative on set, and we built a great working relationship and friendship that allowed us to really go there in some of the more intense scenes in the movie,” Sweeney says via email. “It was really important for us to have a fun on-set environment so we could have a balance and deliver what fans of the novel will want to see.”
With over two decades of experience in the industry, Seyfried is now something of an elder statesman to actresses like Sweeney, putting Seyfried in a position to offer advice and guidance. When I bring this up, she lets out a big puff of breath, tucking her knees up to her chest on the other side of our booth.
“She’s got it so much harder than I ever did—not even close. She’s got a spotlight on her that I never had, never wanted,” Seyfried says. “I can’t help but feel somewhat protective of her, though she doesn’t need my protection. She’s gonna continue to make choices in her career that I think will define, or at least solidify, her as an actual actress because people are too distracted by all the other shit that is created around her.”
Seyfried admires Sweeney’s ability to exist without “holding a shield up,” describing her as someone who is still trying to have fun despite the many controversies that follow her—including, most recently, a divisive American Eagle campaign. While a key part of Seyfried’s longevity has certainly come down to keeping Hollywood as a whole at an arm’s distance, she knows that things are just different for this generation of actresses.
“If social media was the way it is now when I was in my 20s, I don’t know how I would have fared,” Seyfried admits. “I stay out of drama. I try to stay out of the fray, but anywhere she goes, she’s in the fray, and that’s not necessarily up to her.”
Of course, try as she might, Seyfried does occasionally end up in the fray. That was the case this past September, when she commented on an Instagram post about Charlie Kirk’s death calling him “hateful.” For a brief moment after leaving the comment, she wondered if she should delete it but decided against it. Then the backlash began. Seyfried was flooded with texts from concerned friends and lost sleep worrying that she and her family were in an unsafe position because of one Instagram comment. She woke up the next day feeling resolved about her position and took to her own Instagram to clarify her comment rather than backing down.
“I’m not fucking apologizing for that. I mean, for fuck’s sake, I commented on one thing. I said something that was based on actual reality and actual footage and actual quotes. What I said was pretty damn factual, and I’m free to have an opinion, of course,” she says firmly. “Thank God for Instagram. I was able to give some clarity, and it was about getting my voice back because I felt like it had been stolen and recontextualized—which is what people do, of course.”
Regardless of how frequently Seyfried publicly engages with discourse, it’s clear while speaking with her that politics are at the top of her mind. It comes up mere minutes after I turn on my recorder, and I can’t blame her. The day we met, millions of Americans were on the verge of losing their SNAP benefits because of the government shutdown. There’s a strong cognitive dissonance between that reality and our position tucked at the back of Le Crocodile, a chic Brooklyn restaurant.
“It’s always hard to see people who are tricky and harmful have success—like our gorgeous president, the best possible example of that,” she says sarcastically, her gaze drifting toward the windows. “It’s so weird to sit in a civilized restaurant. People are serving us food. You can’t unpack it too much, or else you’ll go fucking insane. Like, how is the world still spinning?”
“It seems ridiculous at times because people are marching the streets, and I’m not one of them—at least not today. I have to remember that I have nothing to apologize for unless I’m harming someone emotionally, physically, mentally,” she says a little later on. “It’s getting so dark that I feel like I gotta just keep my head on and make sure that I get the train on time and promote my movies. A lot of people’s lives depend on that movie being promoted.”
She got on the train to the city this morning and launched herself into a full-blown promotional cycle for two movies that she loves for very different reasons. Seyfried is especially excited to get back on the press tour with Fastvold, as they’re sharing beauty teams and stylists with each other. “We’re doing it like sisters,” she says with a big smile. Though she’s a veteran of one Oscar campaign, her nomination came in the middle of the COVID years, which meant she could do all her campaigning from the comfort of her home. Even if things will be different this time around, though, there’s no complaining from Seyfried.
“I will campaign myself because there’s a seat at the table for me, and I want to stay there. Nothing is owed to me, and nothing is promised,” she says. “I’m talking about a movie that I’m incredibly proud of and all that I got to do.”
(Image credit: Future)
Seyfried knows how to make a press tour fun. Already, she scored a viral moment in Venice when she publicly asked her stylist to share an outfit already worn by Julia Roberts: a Versace suit, which marked Dario Vitale’s debut at the Italian house. It was a smart move on everyone’s part, scoring more press for their respective projects, but it was also a nod toward her stylist Elizabeth Stewart’s sustainable red carpet ethos. It also, quite frankly, was not a big deal to Seyfried. “We share our clothes when we’re growing up,” she says, her signature big eyes widening in disbelief. “It’s funny that that would be considered brave or ballsy because I’m just wearing something that was worn because it’s a cool outfit!”
She rewears her own stuff, too, appearing at an event at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival in her own cashmere sweater and skirt. It helps that she has access to some of the best brands in fashion. Seyfried proudly pulls up a picture of the costume she wore to the Halloween party she hosted the weekend prior and confesses, with some sheepishness, that the boots she’s wearing were stolen from Burberry. “I don’t steal things, but I absolutely swiped those,” she says with a mischievous grin. “I should have credited Burberry, but then they would have known where they were.”
Seyfried has fun off the red carpet too: Who could forget her cover of Joni Mitchell’s “California” from her appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon earlier this year? Sure, she’d needed a glass of wine for courage before doing it, but it paid off when she went mega-viral for her talent. “I got work from that,” she says proudly. “I feel like that made more of an impact than my Emmy did.”
Still, through it all, the grounding force for Seyfried is family. They spend most of their time at a farm upstate (she took the train into town for our interview, a semi-regular commute for her), and she’s at the point where she’s negotiated a term into all of her contracts that requires she get three days between every 10-day period to fly home and be with them. She helps care for a wide variety of animals, detailing a health issue she’s having with a pet rabbit and whipping out her phone to show me a video she captured just the day before of one of her horses running joyously around a field. If anything will keep a hint of diva from sneaking in, it’s working on a farm.
Most of her friends upstate aren’t in the industry, and they’re all in our age group. When we meet, we’re both nearing our 40th birthdays (Seyfried’s happened in early December; mine will come next summer), and we get deep into a conversation about early perimenopause and how we’re prepping for that big change. Seyfried is not a gatekeeper. Throughout our lunch, she recommends adaptogenic, not hallucinogenic, mushrooms (“Lion’s mane, reishi, cordyceps, ashwagandha, whatever I have on hand, I always take two, and I take them in tinctures,” she says); insists I take a photo of the CBD oil that she loves; and hypes up IPL laser treatment for skincare. She’s definitely thinking about changing beauty standards too, but no major surgeries are on the horizon—at least for now. “I have a really good dermatologist who tells me that she’s never gonna do anything but put Botox in the same place for the rest of my life,” she says, pointing at that exact spot on her forehead.
When she pictures being in her 40s, she describes it as a “cozy booth.”
“I know life is harder the older you get, but I also know that I’m pretty prepped because I’ve done a lot of work in the decade of my 30s,” she says. “I’ve done a lot of couples therapy. I’ve done a lot of therapy alone. I’ve had insane amounts of conversations with psychologists and friends who are psychologists that I feel like I have a lot of self-knowledge. It’s not everything, but it certainly goes a long way.”
So what’s next? Well, when we part ways, Seyfried will head to a meeting about a top-secret project that she can’t talk about. While there are undoubtedly exciting things on the docket, I had to ask about one of the most coveted sequels in cinema: Mamma Mia 3.
“I would bet that it would happen in 2027 because we shot [Mamma Mia] in 2007, came out in 2008. [We] shot [Mamma Mia 2] in 2017 when Nina was 6 months old, came out in 2018, and I think Stellan [Skarsgård] or Pierce [Brosnan] was like, ‘Can we not have it be another 10 years till we make the third?'” she explains. Whenever it happens, she’ll be thrilled. “People just love those movies, for God’s sake, but I love them too. It was so nice—[it would be] so fucking indulgent at this point,” she adds.
On that note, that mysterious meeting calls. We’ve already spent over two hours together, our conversation wandering from topic to topic the way it would between two old friends. But before she goes, in a classic mom move, Seyfried pulls a number of snacks from her bag—a couple of fun-size Kit Kats from her Halloween stash, a strawberry oat bar her kids love, a spare protein bar that she raves about—and insists I take them with me before we head back out into the rain.
It’s the perfect symbol of her diva-free philosophy.
Photographer: Vanessa Granda
Stylist: Lauren Eggertsen
Hairstylist: Serge Normant
Makeup Artist: Genevieve Herr
Manicurist: Jazz Style
Set Designer: Julia Dias
Creative Director: Natalia Sztyk
Entertainment Director: Jessica Baker
Producer: Lindsay Ferro
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