We meet, at Amanda Seyfried’s suggestion, in the middle of nowhere. That’s to say, we meet at a discreet and casually elegant upstate restaurant. On an eminence at the heart of the sprawling property, the restaurant overlooks a painter’s delight of fields, woods, and distant hills, a mosaic of brown and gold on this cloudy late-fall day. When the actor slips in the door—tiny, barefaced, looking like a teenager in jeans and an oversized button-down shirt, her enormous, intensely green eyes alight in her luminous face behind waves of blond hair still damp from the shower—she greets the staff warmly.
In a few weeks, she will return for her 40th, a celebration that will be capped off by a roller-skating birthday party at the local rink. “I’ve never had a party for myself,” she says excitedly, though: “I just tore my meniscus, and I’m not supposed to skate. But there’s other things to do.” She’s eager to share details: Manhattans will be the signature drink; the DJ will play ’90s and early-aughts pop; there’ll be a caricature artist and a photo booth. Mostly, Seyfried seems excited that her sister, Jenni, 43, is coming all the way from California, to surprise their mom, who lives with Amanda’s family and is her nanny: “My mom doesn’t know—it’s so fun—it’s so good…! My mom doesn’t get any surprises.” (A few weeks later, when I follow up, she informs me that her sister “came into the house in a cow-head mask—Halloween decorations yet to be put in storage—and it was so out of context my mom struggled to understand her presence at first. It was really funny.”)
Within our first few minutes together, Seyfried conveys several important details about herself. She’s someone who accentuates the positive. (She mentions only in passing her torn meniscus, which is surely both painful and a big disappointment for her party plans.) She acknowledges that she’s “very controlling.” (Even as she’s speaking to me, fully engaged, never looking away, she’s simultaneously fixing our uneven table by slipping little pink Sweet’N Low packets beneath the offending leg.) And she’s grounded, surrounding herself not with glamour but with family and close friends. “It surprises me,” Jenni tells me, “that she can still access that part of her that wants to do simple, quiet things.”
Seyfried has had a busy year. Her recent roles amply show that she has evolved into a performer of remarkable range and depth, inhabiting risky, complex characters—far from her light-hearted turns in Mean Girls (2004) and Mamma Mia! (2008). In 2021 she received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress for her role as Marion Davies in Mank. Not long after, her riveting portrayal of Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu’s The Dropout garnered her an Emmy for lead actress in a limited series in 2022. Last year brought the release of Long Bright River, an eight-episode Peacock drama in which she plays a Philadelphia cop dealing with the opioid crisis.
More recently, there is The Housemaid, Paul Feig’s blockbuster adaptation of Freida McFadden’s best-selling novel, in which she plays Nina, the wealthy, volatile employer of Millie the maid (Sydney Sweeney). “Amanda turns a note that could be marginal into something that changes her whole performance,” says Feig, who had long wanted to cast her. “If you push Nina too far, she becomes a cartoon. In any lesser actor’s hands, she could be a sketch—but Amanda turns her into a three-dimensional character.” Indeed, Seyfried’s balance of intensity and subtlety renders Nina strangely familiar, a layered person who in turns we envy, fear, hate, pity, and eventually even admire. “I actually felt bad for Sydney and Brandon [Sklenar],” Seyfried says with a sly smile, referring to her costars, “because I get to play, and they can’t. They couldn’t play. Well, Sydney feasts a little bit at the end. But I feast the whole time.” She describes working on The Housemaid as “like capturing lightning in a bottle,” and says, of Feig, that “he, like Mona, appreciates and honors the absurdity of humanity.” (A sequel is set to start filming this year.)
And, of course, there is her performance as the eponymous leader in Mona Fastvold’s sweeping musical biopic about the 18th-century founder of the Shaker religion, The Testament of Ann Lee. (For both Long Bright River and The Testament of Ann Lee, she earned a Golden Globe nomination for best actress.) The Testament of Ann Lee is a film unlike any other—expansive, ravishing, deeply moving—and Seyfried’s layered, visceral performance is its center. Fastvold, who also directed The World to Come (2020), frequently collaborates with her partner, Brady Corbet, who directed The Brutalist, and together they wrote The Testament of Ann Lee, which resembles The Brutalist in its ambition and scale and is equally gloriously shot. But this film is in every way a deeply feminist—or, as Fastvold says, “feminine”—film, telling the story of an unsung radical female icon in early American history.
A few days before I meet Seyfried, I convene with Fastvold at Rucola in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood—a café where strollers are parked, kids are clambering, and the music is oddly loud. Ethereally beautiful, with platinum hair, Fastvold radiates calm, a complement to Seyfried’s quicksilver curiosity, though both women have about them an inspiring clarity.
Fastvold, who is Norwegian, confesses that she was amazed to discover that Ann Lee, who was born in humble circumstances in 1736 in Manchester, England, before migrating to New York, is largely unknown, even to Americans. “I thought maybe children learn about Ann Lee in school: ‘This is one of our first feminists in America,’” she says. “Then I realized the only thing people knew about the Shakers was cottagecore design.” Fastvold, though, was passionately inspired by Lee’s biography, and imagined a film that would dramatize not only her story, but the kinds of convictions that contributed to the founding of this country. “Some stories are telling you they want to be big and expansive and have scope and scale,” Fastvold says, “and Ann Lee definitely wanted a grand story.”
An illiterate laborer and cook, Lee joined the Shaking Quaker sect in 1758. After bearing and losing four children, she spent time in a mental hospital and became a visionary. In 1774 she led a group of her followers from Manchester to New York City. They sailed in a barely seaworthy ship that almost foundered and established their settlement at Niskayuna, in what is now a suburb of Albany, New York, little more than an hour’s drive from Seyfried’s farm. Known to her congregants as “Mother Ann,” alternately nurturing and firmly authoritative, Lee regarded them as her children, continuing to enlarge the community with her brother William’s help until her death in 1784.
Fastvold’s film follows Lee from early childhood in Manchester to Niskayuna and beyond. Beautifully shot in 70 millimeter—one critic has likened its stills to Caravaggio paintings—The Testament of Ann Lee is punctuated by otherworldly singing of original Shaker hymns arranged by Daniel Blumberg, the brilliant composer who scored The Brutalist; and by sensual, eloquent group dances, choreographed by Fastvold’s close friend Celia Rowlson-Hall. Fastvold wanted to convey the visceral details of women’s embodied experience, including sex, birth, and breastfeeding.
For Fastvold, Seyfried was an obvious choice for the role. The two had met socially long before, but first worked together on the Apple TV series The Crowded Room (2023), an experience Seyfried describes as “slightly chaotic.” But “in the midst of the drama there was Mona—clear and sound—leading with the grace and curiosity of a true artist.” On this series, Fastvold recalls, “I really saw her dramatic range. And, of course, she’s an incredible singer and mover. I saw all the parts come together for her to play this role.” The Testament of Ann Lee gives Seyfried more freedom than she’s ever had as a performer, and Seyfried seems to have repaid that with total devotion. “She just trust-falls into my arms when we’re working together,” says Fastvold, “and it’s the greatest gift you can get as a director.”
Both Fastvold and Seyfried were committed to creating a distinct environment during the filming, which took place mostly in Hungary in the summer of 2024, with small sections filmed in Sweden and at the Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts. “We had a very strong idea around how we wanted the set to be,” Fastvold explains. “We need things to be really warm, creative, nurturing.” There was an abiding feeling of “togetherness,” says Seyfried’s costar Thomasin McKenzie, who plays one of Ann Lee’s closest companions and acts as the film’s narrator. “Amanda is someone who fosters that feeling of community. She makes you feel like part of something, she really invites you in. There’s no filter to Amanda Seyfried, and that’s beautiful to be around.” The experience was different from past projects, McKenzie notes—for one thing, everyone brought their families, which in Seyfried’s case included not only her husband and two children, but also their aged family dog, Finn. The kids “had summer camp together with our various different spouses taking turns helping out, doing little field trips with them,” Fastvold explains.
Seyfried recalls the beauty of the challenging final weeks of filming, after their families had returned to the US, leaving the women to finish their work: “We had to physically hold each other. It related to the actual context, to this woman I was portraying—she lived from a place of nurturing. Mona and I lived together the last two weeks, and we were all just mothers and women and artists, and we missed our families. I’d wake up in the morning and she’d have this candle going—she’s very Scandinavian—and this little JBL speaker, playing really beautiful jazz.” And at the day’s end: “We have a video of Mona singing, humming to herself, and it’s probably 2 a.m. at that point, and she’s undoing my braids….”
For Seyfried, in spite of her huge career, home life remains paramount. Fastvold says, “It matters to her that she chooses projects that she cares about, because what she wants is to be with her family, obviously, to be on her farm.” Seyfried, who is clearly something of a homebody, organizes her work so as to maximize her time there. When, over several months, she was filming Long Bright River in New York City, she preserved time for her kids: “It’s the privilege I have at this point in my career,” she explains. “I can say, ‘Listen, I’ll make this work, but…I have to sleep with my kids Friday night, Saturday, Sunday—I have to go to bed with them.’ That’s my only rule. And it does fuel me. I mean, it probably helps them, but it definitely helps me.”
The younger of two daughters raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Seyfried began her career in TV commercials when she was 10: “Our mom was incredibly supportive,” says her older sister Jenni. “She spent a lot of time taking her to auditions.” Seyfried had her first speaking part at 15, followed by a recurring role on All My Children, before appearing in Mean Girls as Regina George’s sidekick Karen Smith, whose breasts can predict rain. I ask about the challenges of growing up in the unforgiving public eye: “I didn’t get more famous or recognizable in any way until I was 18,” she says. I point out that many might consider 18 pretty young for fame. “But I wasn’t the star,” she says. “I didn’t become super-famous overnight. I was just somewhat recognizable and appreciated.”
Her peers from that era—Lindsay Lohan, for example—led much more public lives and struggled with issues like addiction, body dysmorphia, and depression. Seyfried, meanwhile, faced a different set of challenges, as she suffers from “really extreme” obsessive-compulsive disorder, she tells me, formally diagnosed when she was 19. “I was living in Marina del Rey at the time, shooting Big Love”—Seyfried played a supporting role on the first four seasons—“and my mom had to take a sabbatical from work in Pennsylvania to live with me for a month. I got my brain scans, and that’s when I got on medication—which to this day, I’m on every night.” Her condition meant that, while professional rejection didn’t unnerve her (“It’s the nature of the beast”), she couldn’t countenance other risks that might unsettle her, like “drinking too much alcohol, or doing any drugs at all, or staying out too late.” She laughs: “I would make plans and then just not go. I guess I did make choices…. I didn’t enter that realm of nightclubs. I gotta give credit to my OCD.”
Seyfried has always stayed close to her family—Jenni lived with her in Los Angeles and worked as her assistant. “I never had many famous friends,” she says. She’s tight with her longtime makeup artist Stephanie Pasicov, and her agent Abby Bluestone, who helped her find her upstate farmhouse 12 years ago. (“I’ve been with her since I was, like, 16, which is, I know, rare—we fight like sisters. She knows more about me than I do.”) Her dearest friends, who’ll gather for her 40th birthday party, have been in her life for years. And of course her husband, the actor Thomas Sadoski, whom she met in 2015 when they starred together in the Off Broadway production of The Way We Get By, will be with her, along with their daughter and son, aged eight and five.
When the owner of the restaurant stops by our table, they catch up like old friends, slipping into conversation about a cow Seyfried spotted a few days earlier on the fringes of the property. The owner expresses surprise: Cows aren’t permitted on the lawns. “It was in the tree line,” she clarifies, and then, emphatically: “There was a cow, and it was brown.” Later, when the server returns with a plate of chocolate chip cookies, Seyfried points out to her some newly arrived animals apparently grazing in the distance: “I’m sorry, there’s a fucking cow out there,” she says cheerfully. “They’re not invented. You need to tell him.”
Farm animals loom large in Seyfried’s life—arguably they, too, are part of her family: The Seyfried-Sadoski household lives on and runs an animal rescue farm that’s registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit: “When I say it’s a rescue, it’s fully a rescue—it’s my dream.” Assisted by one trusted caretaker who lives nearby, they tend various breeds of chickens. She brings me a gift of six perfect little eggs with cream-colored shells, laid that morning by her Silkies. “People just give us chickens,” she explains, bemused. They have pond ducks and barn ducks (“One of them got eaten the other night—it was probably a fox”); they have goats, mostly donated; they have cats, including a couple recently saved from the ASPCA (“One is so old and decrepit that he just has diarrhea all the time, but he still purrs when he eats”). They have their beloved 16-year-old Australian shepherd–border collie Finn, “a big guy and brilliant, brilliant, and he still runs like an asshole.” And they have a pony, a donkey, and six horses. She tells me their names, and where they came from—“They usually come with problems, or they’re really old, or they’re lame, or whatever.” Seyfried, who rides occasionally but “never will get comfortable on a horse,” prefers simply to embrace the equines: “I just hug them, on my own feet.”
Seyfried and Sadoski’s young daughter and son attend the local village school. “He’s in kindergarten, she’s in third grade, and their classrooms just happened to be next to each other this year…. I want to bottle it up,” she adds, aware how fast children grow up. When I ask whether they understand what their mother does, she hesitates: “My world’s moving so fast, and there’s so many things I have to do each day,” she explains, “and there’s no way I can express what I’m doing. I just make very clear every day: ‘I really would rather be home with you.’” At the same time, she wants them to understand that she loves her work: “I’m having a great time, right? It’s not painful suffering.”
Sadoski is also an acclaimed actor—perhaps best known for his roles in The Newsroom and Life in Pieces—and will be working on a theater production in the spring. He, she says, “sacrifices a lot for me. He also knows that, in this moment, the opportunities I’m being afforded are insane…,” she trails off. “I do say no a lot,” she assures me.
Seyfried’s current life is rich and full. Last summer she filmed The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd, directed by Tim Blake Nelson (“His notes were poetry—me and my fellow actors would be like, Tim, do you have any more notes?”); she’s producing a documentary that she’s passionate about; she’s doing an animated Cinderella for Netflix; and, of course, she’s promoting Ann Lee.
Toward the end of our long lunch, Seyfried, who knows she was “born to sing,” explains the essential importance of her embodied experience in this exhilarating middle of her life. She initially struggled, she says, with the film’s Shaker hymns: “I couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t see it. But at that point I was just like, Something needs to change within…. It’s just a new perspective on what this woman is, and why she sings. She doesn’t sing the way I sing; she’s singing to get closer to God…. I had to wrap my head around singing from a place within me that doesn’t care about how it sounds.”
She describes recording one of the songs for the film in London with the composer Daniel Blumberg and the cellist Okkyung Lee: “She was playing, and he was playing. I just sat there, and I had to sing it. I didn’t have headphones, and I didn’t have a microphone. I couldn’t hear it. When Daniel and I went into the studio booth to hear it back, it sounded so clear. I was singing from my body, not with my ear. What a fucking thrill.” She pauses, then explains: “And that’s my whole perspective in the world now: I’m listening for truth, I’m listening for what’s real. I’m trying to listen in a different way.”
In this story: hair, Tamás Tüzes; makeup, Emi Kaneko; manicurist, Gina Edwards; tailor, Olga Kim at Carol Ai Studio Tailors.
To get the cover look, try: Teint Idôle Ultra Wear foundation, Teint Idôle Ultra Wear concealer, Blush Subtil in 1000 Berry Bisou, Lash Idôle Flutter Extension mascara, Lip Idôle lip liner in 26 Don’t Be Chai, L’Absolu Rouge Drama Ink lipstick in 221 Dramatized Nude. All by Lancôme.
Set Design: Sean Thomson. Spinning wheel, rocking chair, and side chair provided by Shaker Museum, Chatham, New York.
Movement Director: Celia Rowlson-Hall.
Location: INNESS.
Produced by Hen’s Tooth Productions.
Video: DP, Basil Fauchier; Lighting Director, Liberto Fillo; 1st AC, Cindy Chen; Post Production, Chapter Post; Editors, Gennesis Pantaleon, Dester Linares; Color Grading, Dmitry Litvinov; Sound Composition, Henry D’Arthenay.
Amanda Seyfried is Vogue’s January Digital Cover Star. Subscribe to Vogue.