‘I Can Understand How You Get On Your Knees’: Amanda Seyfried on Obsession, Devotion, and the Joy of Tights | film

nMany actors are concerned with the aftercare of the audience. When it comes to The Covenant of Ann Lee, Amanda Seyfried is hands-on. “Did you watch it with someone you could talk to?” she asks, tilting her head sympathetically, then closing her full frontal eyes and giving me a worried look when I admit I saw it alone. “It’s nice to process it with someone else.”

Her concern is understandable. Whatever emotions the film arouses, indifference will not be among them. It’s a lively, impassioned film, an eccentric film in every way, the kind of shattered illusions — an 18th-century musical biopic complete with frenetic, soaring visions — that were once typical of Lars von Trier or Bruno Dumont. I admit I didn’t know exactly what to do about it, but I knew I had a unique experience. The film’s director, Mona Fastvold, looks happy as she sits next to Seyfried on a sofa in a London hotel room. “This is my favorite feeling,” she says.

Fastvold co-wrote the screenplay with her partner, Brady Corbett. Their previous collaborations include last year’s Oscar-winning drama The Brutalist, which Corbett directed. (The pair also perform second unit directing duties on each other’s films.) Like that film, The Covenant of Ann Lee is an immigrant story, though in this case it’s a real-life story. Seyfried gives a bravura, stirring performance as Lee, the illiterate daughter of a Mancunian blacksmith, who in 1758 joins the Shaking Quakers, a religious group known for its shuddering, trembling dances with which its followers respond to the infusion of God’s spirit. This was accompanied by a loud song and breathy rhythmic incantations. For the film, British composer Daniel Blomberg, who won an Oscar for his score for The Brutalist, dramatically adapted real Shaker hymns and spirituals.

In 1774, Lee and her fellow Shakers brought religion to the United States, building a village in Albany County, New York, and preaching their gospel of peace, equality of race and sex—and celibacy. Just as there is austere beauty in the simple furniture made by the Shakers, such as the ladder-back chairs with woven seats, other elements of their lives were similarly pared down. “No one can love God while following the lust of the flesh,” Lee tells the disgruntled husband who fathered her four children, all of whom died in infancy. Her maternal torment heightened her religious devotion. “She decided to be a mother to the world,” Fastvold says.

Aside from their vanilla hair, she and Seyfried are a study in contrasts today. The 40-year-old Pennsylvania-born actress, wearing a black dress with a white collar, relaxed enough to stretch her bare legs and place her black-shoeed feet on the coffee table. When you speak, you gesture extensively. Fastvold, 44, barely moves: The former Norwegian dancer sits on the edge of the sofa, her hands clasped in her lap. Her outfit gives a Star Trek vibe: a charcoal top with solid, boxy shoulders that juts out from gray ribbed sleeves. Together, the actor and director resemble a lively student and her reserved but devoted governess.

They’re both singing from the same hymn sheet about how they hope viewers will approach the film. Introducing the screening at the American Film Institute last year, Seyfried told the audience: “Don’t be afraid to laugh: It’s silly in moments and that’s what makes it special.” Fastvold agrees: “It’s an operatic process,” she says now. “Sometimes it’s very serious, sometimes it doesn’t take itself seriously at all. You don’t want to make fun of anyone, but at the same time we can’t be full of religious rockers. It’s not like we’re trying to convert people.”

Fastfold found Ann Lee’s story while researching her previous film, the 19th-century lesbian drama The World to Come. The question that hangs over the new picture, as with any older work, is: Why are we telling this story today? “The more I discovered, the more I felt I needed it now more than ever. We need to think about leadership in a different way. Leaders around the world lead from a place of fear and intimidation, which is the opposite of Ann Lee. She led from a place of care, motherhood, and equality.”

Fastvold met Seyfried when she was directing three episodes of the 2023 series The Crowded Room, in which the actor played a detective interrogating a suspected gunman (Tom Holland); They worked together again last year on the missing person miniseries Long Bright River. In between, Seyfried gave Ann Lee the script and offered her the role. The story goes that her immediate response was: “I know the way in.”

“You an act “Say that,” Fastvold says, beaming with pride at her star. “But you also said, ‘Maybe you should cast someone British.’ Maybe you shouldn’t trust me. You had all these excuses. It was kind of nice, like you wanted what was best for me and the movie.”

What method did Seyfried identify? “I was rooted in Anne’s absolute passion and devotion,” she says. “I can understand how someone could be brought to their knees like that, and how delicious and attractive that is to people who need something to believe in.”

Undermining her self-confidence was something else: “fear.” She hasn’t been afraid of a role since she played Marion Davies, the mistress of media baron William Randolph Hearst, in David Fincher’s Citizen Kane-adjacent Mank. “Anything that seems far from contemporary in the world scares me. Which makes it worth it a thousand times over.”

Mank walked away happily: Seyfried’s delightful performance stole the film and brought her an Oscar nomination. There could be a number of reasons why she didn’t get a reason to play Ann Lee. The film itself is intoxicating once it’s sent, but not everyone will be. An anonymous Academy voter recently told Variety that Seyfried was “amazing… I haven’t seen a better performance this year,” but admitted that they “didn’t really like the movie.”

Perhaps her honesty also worked against her this time. Last year, she stunningly distinguished herself by refusing to back down from calling slain far-right activist Charlie Kirk “hateful” in an Instagram comment. “I don’t apologize for it,” she told Who What Wear. In her own statement, she addressed the importance of nuance: “I can relate to the anger of the misogyny and racist rhetoric, and I also strongly agree that the murder of Charlie Kirk was deeply disturbing and unfortunate in every way imaginable.”

Shortly after this controversy, it seemed that her name stopped appearing among the five actresses expected to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Actress this year. Could it be that the Academy is fearing another social media-related uproar in this category after last year’s scandal over the reactionary tweets of Emilia Perez’s co-star, Carla Sofía Gascón? Seyfried doesn’t need to care. “I’ve come this far without an Oscar,” she told The New Yorker this month. “Why do I need one now?” She is, as she said, “sitting beautifully” after the success of her crazy thriller The Housemaid, in which she co-starred with Sydney Sweeney. With that and Ann Lee’s will, she sewed up the multiplex and the art house.

As a trained singer, she had starred in musicals before, but Ann Lee’s Testament was more demanding than Mamma Mia! Or Les Misérables. “It’s very technical: the choreography, the live singing, the Manchester accent. I was spinning a lot of plates.” Long before filming began, preparations were already underway. “While I was at other jobs, I was working on my Mancunian accent for my trailer by watching videos of Maxine Peake.” Celia Rolison Hall’s choreography also made enormous demands on her. “There was a lot of repetitive movement, using my body in a way I had never done before. It becomes this complete expression of your devotion. I was this vessel. It was exciting and scary and wonderful!” To relieve stress after a day of rhythmically hitting, reeling and swinging at the 18th^–Costume of the Century, she was “listening to something ridiculously detached like the Backstreet Boys”.

Much of the film was shot in Hungary, on a crowded set: Fastvold encouraged the cast and crew to take their children with them as well. Once most of the families left, the two women became roommates until the final stage. “I had her move into my apartment,” Seyfried says. “It was very convenient.”

“I wanted to!” Fastfold protests. “The nice thing is, we were both working and taking care of our kids, but once I moved in with Amanda…” she turned to address her directly: “You were doing little things to take care of me. I was doing laundry, and then I went out site scouting on Sunday, and when I got home my socks were rolled up and put in my closet. I almost cried. Brady takes such good care of me and makes the best sandwich ever. But at the same time, there was something about living with this mommy person that was amazing. You put a ceiling on it. High for the future. “Now I’m going to ask all my leading ladies: How do you feel about folding laundry?”

Nutrition flowed in both directions. “I would wake up and there would be a French press, beautiful music playing, and a candle lit,” Seyfried recalls. “We went to the spa and I brought your little shot list. Mona is so funny. She’s getting ready for work and she has her cute bandana. I was like, ‘Oh my God, she’s an angel from heaven!'” Not the kind of story you hear from a Michael Bay set.

Fastvold and Corbett have an 11-year-old daughter, Ada, while Seyfried and her husband, Thomas Sadoski, have a son and a daughter, both under 10. Corbett made sure to highlight a tearful Ada in the audience at last year’s Golden Globe Awards when he won Best Director. “Early on, when my daughter was little, she was like, ‘Why do you have to go make a movie and get away from me?'” Fastvold says. Why can’t you become a teacher?’ My instinct was, ‘I should go out and make money for us.’ Then I realized that wasn’t the right thing to say. What I should say is, ‘I’m leaving you because I really want to do this job.’ I’m so excited to do it. I’m going to miss you, but I’m going to have a good time. And I accepted it in a completely different way. And I didn’t feel like I had to leave.”

Seyfried loves letting her children see her vulnerability. “One day, I said to my daughter: ‘I am sad because now I am tired and traveling far from you, and I miss you.’ But she knows that what I am doing now is important to me. Of course, she also knows that I will bring things for her. She will get the stationery, she will get the plush…”

Both women were effusive in their praise for each other while promoting The Covenant of Ann Lee, but two adjectives jumped out: Fastvold admiringly described her star as “a little crazy,” while Seyfried called “brave.” Would they care to explain? Fastvold clarifies her observation: “Crazy in a funny way. I think we’re better than we are. What I mean is that Amanda is very free. I think she doesn’t need any filter to get to all the places she needs to go in her work.”

As for the courage part: “You don’t care about the rules,” Seyfried tells Fastfold. “You don’t care if something is hard to do. You definitely stay in your own way. Look, I directed a Shaker suite in the 1770s about a woman no one had ever heard of. And it premiered in The gun!“

It almost sounds like Ann Lee. Does this mean that there is a biographical dimension to the film? Fastfold smiles sheepishly. “Isn’t there always?” She says.