Amanda Seyfried Gave Everything to ‘Long Bright River’: “I Went to Hell and Back”

Right after Amanda Seyfried wrapped production on the restricted series Long Bright River, she flew to Budapest to film a movie musical. Long Bright River had demanded her attention for “four months straight, nonstop, day in, day out.” The ambitious musical to follow, Ann Lee—cowritten by The Brutalist’s team of Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold and directed by Fastvold—proved similarly taxing. “I went to hell and back…. Oh my God. What the fuck? Even my assistant’s like, ‘You need to take a break,’” Seyfried tells Vanity Fair, still in a state of disbelief. “We could only do [Ann Lee] in the summer…. We moved everybody to Budapest, including my dog. Then we did a crazy thing. We did a crazy thing. I don’t know how it’s going to turn out.”

She says all this with a giddy grin. Speaking with Seyfried, one senses an actor in her prime who’s still hungry for more. The Mean Girls and Mamma Mia! breakout’s career entered a fresh drive after she portrayed Marion Davies in 2020’s Mank, scoring an Oscar nomination, and Elizabeth Holmes in 2022’s The Dropout, winning the Emmy and Golden Globe for best actress in a restricted series. That acclaimed show marked the first time “in my adult life that I’d done something for that long, that intensely,” Seyfried says. Long Bright River became the second.

Seyfried signed on to Peacock’s fresh series (premiering all eight episodes on March 13) immediately after reading the best-selling Liz Moore novel on which the adaptation is based. “I just had to make the choice to commit, no matter what the episodes were, how well written they were going to be or not,” she says. A few elements of the Long Bright River story struck Seyfried, beginning with its setting of Philadelphia; Seyfried grew up in nearby Allentown. The book is also specifically set in the oft-sensationalized neighborhood of Kensington, exploring the pain and resilience of a community ravaged by opioid addiction. That subject has touched Seyfried’s immediate family as well.