Interview:All of a sudden, Amanda Seyfried is everywhere, and ahead of her next film, which involves working with Glenn Close adn John Banville, she discusses picking roles, long-distance relationships and writing songs with Damien Rice
FOR SOME LUCKY young Hollywood actors, there comes a moment when they become suddenly ubiquitous: out of nowhere, it seems, they're constantly in the cinemas, on magazine covers, in gossip columns – everywhere they are supposed to be, essentially, and all at once. The speed with which this can happen is a mystifying part of the star-making process, so who better to ask about how it occurs than the suddenly ubiquitous 24-year-old actor Amanda Seyfried, who in short order has appeared in the steamy thriller Chloe, this week's weepy Dear John, and another romance, Letters to Juliet, due later this summer, as well as the recent Vanity FairYoung Hollywood spread. Surely she can shed light on how a star is born?
“The only reason people say I’m having a moment is because all these movies are coming out at the same time,” she says, twirling a finger through her long blonde hair as she considers how she has reached this point. “But that wasn’t my doing at all. I did these movies separately, there were two and three months between all these films, but they’re all coming out in a short window. It’s dumb luck in the beginning, picking these parts, then it has to become calculated – you have to establish yourself a bit, and then you have to get quite strategic, which can be a pain in the ass, choosing between projects. It’s nice people are recognising me, though.”
Seyfried is certainly becoming recognisable. While her face might have been familiar after parts in Mean Girls, Mamma Mia!and the HBO series Big Love, it is the current run of starring roles that is likely to make her name just as well-known. Her leading-lady credentials were burnished in February when Dear John– the tale of a young couple separated by war in the Middle East, adapted from a book by Nicholas Sparks – was released in the US. Very much in the mould of The Notebook, another Sparks adaptation, Dear Johnenjoyed a huge opening weekend, which was enough to finally knock Avatar off the top of the charts, and in Hollywood, where box office is all that matters, it was the moment when Seyfried had truly arrived.
On screen, she manages that difficult balancing act between being conventionally beautiful and ever so slightly odd-looking, with full lips and round cheeks and, most strikingly, absolutely massive eyes that dominate her face. In person, she is minuscule and fragile looking – she offers some cupcake as the interview begins, but she really doesn’t look like the sort of person who eats a lot of cupcakes. Her tiny stature makes her eyes even more overwhelmingly disproportionate – there are Disney cartoon characters with smaller peepers. She might as well change her name to “Doe-eyed Amanda Seyfried”, because it will be a long time before anybody reads a review or interview that doesn’t mention them.
A lot of child actors become successful because of the exaggeratedly childish nature of their features – a characteristic that quickly becomes a liability if those features don't sufficiently mature as adulthood approaches. Seyfried is fortunate in that those exaggerated features are just as pronounced as they were when she made her acting debut in TV soap As the World Turnsat the age of 14, but not so much that they make her look like a caricature.
“I set my heart on being an actor at a young age, but had no expectations of it ever happening,” she says of her early career. “I think there’s a difference between the type of person I am and the type of person some other actors are. I’ve met a lot of actors who have known they were going to be a star, and that comes with expectations, because they expect to be a star. Whereas I never . . . I was always taught to be realistic and practical.”
She is self-aware, happy to chat openly, but aware of the pitfalls of her burgeoning stardom. “I don’t want to be a persona, and I don’t think I am yet. I think as soon as the public starts to get to know you as a person, they stop believing in the characters that you are playing. That is very simple math. Just hide away, don’t let people see too much of you. But I like to talk, I’m very open, which is not quite good for what I do, because things are taken out of context, people think they know who I am after that.
“People find it endearing, at first. I talked to a journalist in Vancouver, my first hour-long interview by myself, and I started telling this woman things, and it keeps coming back, the same shitty quotes that I said about Dominic [Cooper, her English boyfriend], and I wondered why I thought she was my friend.”
Occasionally, when pausing mid-sentence to gather her thoughts, Seyfried will lean back and work her fingers dramatically through her blond tresses, almost as a physical punctuation mark. “It’s very unnatural,” she concludes, “but it’s the way it has always been.”
On this point, Seyfried says she learned a lot from Meryl Streep, her on-screen mother in Mamma Mia!. "I was really self-conscious with her, and think I put up a bit of a barrier, but she's lovely and funny and charismatic, and she's really good at separating her life from her career, which is important."
Her role in that movie, belting out Abba hits on a sun-kissed Greek island, was undoubtedly the part that set her on the path to success. "It was a lot of f**king fun," she says – she swears only occasionally, but emphatically, almost calculatedly. It was on the set of that film that she met Cooper, her on-screen lover, and their long-distance relationship has become the subject of the usual gossip-mongers. That real-life situation is mirrored in Dear John, where her beloved, played by the chiselled Channing Tatum, has to go off to fight indeterminate battles in the Middle East, throwing a spanner in their blossoming relationship. Many letters and many, many tears unsurprisingly ensue. "When I had my goodbye scene with Channing, it wasn't hard to find that, because I'm there monthly [with Cooper]. Everybody can relate to that sense of loss."
The forthcoming Letters to Juliet, co-starring Vanessa Redgrave and Gael Garcia Bernal, is another epistolary romance – does she want to continue working in the genre? "No, no, no – after Letters to Juliet, that's it for a while. I just think it could get boring. The movies I like to watch are the movies I tend to want to be in. I like to watch different type of movies, I love to watch the twisted David Lynch-type plots, things with really f**ked-up plots. That's a challenge, finding those. And working with directors who can do that." Her part in Chloewas an attempt to get away from the more conventional young lead roles – she plays a high-class escort hired by Julianne Moore's character to test the fidelity of Moore's husband, played by Liam Neeson. Needless to say, things get complicated.
Directed by the esteemed Atom Egoyan, the film is fatally compromised by a bizarre ending, but it allowed Seyfried to extend her range, even if coverage of the film was preoccupied with her steamy scenes with Moore. "The intention was to see if I could play a part like that," she says. "For somebody my age it was a rare opportunity, and I wouldn't have done it without Atom Egoyan." Chloeopened on limited release in the US, and at one point during this interview Seyfried asks her agent, sitting at the side of the room, how it fared on its opening weekend. She appears delighted when she learns that the film made more than $1 million on its 300-odd screens. The risk of failure is ever-present for rising stars, something Seyfried knows only too well after the miserable box office of Jennifer's Body, the horror-satire she starred in last year with Megan Fox. The film was marketed solely as a Megan Fox vehicle, so Seyfried hasn't been tainted by the fierce negative reaction to the film, but she has learned a valuable lesson. "Obviously, I hope not to fail, not to stop working, but I also know that" – a stretch of the arm, fingers through the hair, contemplative expression in the eyes – "it's fickle. But now I know what my next movie is, it's a great move, I'm really confident in it."
The role Seyfried is so excited about is a supporting part in Albert Nobbs; the screenplay has been adapted from a George Moore short story by the writer John Banville, it stars Glenn Close and filming starts in Dublin in June. "It's a completely different type of movie, very small, with a wonderful director, Rodrigo García [the son of Gabriel García Márquez]. It's very Gosford Park-ish, if I can appropriate that movie, and Glenn Close plays a woman who lives as a man, and who falls in love with my character. I saw a photograph of Glenn in character the other day, and she's strikingly handsome as a man. The script is by far one of the best I've ever read, very detail-oriented. But I have to do a Galway accent for my part, which I'm a bit worried about."
It won't be her first time in Ireland, however. In one of those odd pairings that occasionally happens in the world of famous people, it turns out Seyfried teamed up with one of our august songwriters last year: "I actually worked with Damien Rice where he lives, this past fall and last April. We were writing a song for Dear Johnthat we never finished, but if it ever gets finished I'll be very proud I worked with Damien Rice. He's amazing, he's a really great guy, complex and loving and really musically talented. I got to live in his world for weekends at a time." First Rice, then Banville – is she going to be writing sonnets with Seamus Heaney next?
Actually, in a clear indication of Seyfried's perceived bankability, she will be moving straight from the Dublin set of Albert Nobbsto the Gothic sets of The Girl With the Red Riding Hood, a reimagining of the fairytale by Twilightdirector Catherine Hardwicke that is already receiving a lot of buzz. Her choice of scripts, she says, is increasing all the time: "Last year it was a lot of bad scripts, and a few decent ones. This year it's a few really good ones, and a lot of bad ones. When somebody is sending you really good scripts, and want to offer it to you, you're in a pretty good spot."
And that, in the end, is about as close as Amanda Seyfried comes to revealing how to be a Hollywood star.
Dear Johnopens at cinemas nationwide on Wednesday, April 14th
