Ann Lee, whose father was a blacksmith by day and a tailor by night, grew up destitute and illiterate in Manchester, England. She immigrated to New Y
Ann Lee, whose father was a blacksmith by day and a tailor by night, grew up destitute and illiterate in Manchester, England. She immigrated to New York in 1774, bringing along just six followers—including her committed brother, William (played by Lewis Pullman), and lowly husband, Abraham (Christopher Abbott). By the time of her death a decade later, she’d created one of the largest utopian societies in American history. The group was collectively convinced she’d emerged as the female incarnation of Christ. Fastvold concedes that the Shaker experiment had its faults—“celibacy is a complicated solution,” she says—but found great inspiration in Lee’s vision.
“She took this horrible trauma and turned that suffering into compassion, into community, into how she could mother the world,” Fastvold says. “It’s all about worship through labor, creating something of beauty and of meaning and giving everything you have to it. As someone who wishes to try and create impossible things, that really spoke to me.”
A veteran of big-screen musicals including Les Misérables and Mamma Mia!, Seyfried has been amiable with both Fastvold and Corbet (who also produced Ann Lee) for years. “When you trust somebody as much as I trust Mona, you can’t help but go into the light,” she says. “But I just didn’t believe that I could embody someone who led this type of charge, in this time period.” Seyfried had already taken on a very different kind of cult-adjacent leader in The Dropout, winning an Emmy for her portrayal of scammer entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes—but Ann Lee’s demands were especially daunting. “This felt further from me than anything that I can remember.”
Seyfried worried most about pulling off Ann’s 18th-century Manchester accent, which she devised—effectively, made up—alongside Fastvold and a dialect coach. “The ecstatic dancing and thumping and pounding, the frenzy that the Shakers lived in—I love that. It makes me feel alive,” Seyfried says. “That’s not the thing that intimidates me.” About five months before filming, she started recording songs at Fastvold and Corbet’s apartment with composer Daniel Blumberg (who won an Oscar for The Brutalist and made his feature-film debut on The World to Come). “I was amazed by how she was singing, dancing, getting water thrown over her face,” Blumberg says of Seyfried. “It was such an extreme job.”
Blumberg developed what Fastvold calls a “radical score” based on mostly existing Shaker hymns before composing an original song that plays as the end credits roll. The pair introduced the cast to improvisational singing via vocalists like Shelley Hirsch and Maggie Nicols, honing Ann Lee’s soundscape to feel as primal as possible.
“It’s prayer—it’s not entertainment. So it was important to find strong intent in the way you were using your voice, in the way you were moving your body,” Fastvold says. “It was definitely the most experimental project that I’ve ever worked on,” Blumberg agrees. He was constantly adding and subtracting, finessing tones and rhythms. One day while in New York, Blumberg walked by a music shop and came across a “little bell” from the 1700s. “Suddenly, the bell was all over the film,” he says.
The sound mix we hear in the final film uses those pre-shoot recordings, live singing from Seyfried et al. on set, and studio sessions that took place mere months ago. Seyfried kept reaching deeper and deeper into Ann’s internal life, with Hirsch and Nicols’s exercises encouraging her to run wild. “So much of it was screaming and doing weird takes. I had these crazy moments of complete freedom—the weirder, the better,” Seyfried says. “I was, like, ‘So, basically, we can do whatever the fuck we want.’ But it’s got to come from somewhere—it’s got to be grounded in something. You could ruin your fucking voice, I’ll tell you that.”
COMMENTS