Amanda Seyfried’s harvest moon

It was 2004 when Amanda Seyfried elevated naïveté into an art form as Karen in Mean Girls. Two decades and many hits later – including the highly acclaimed biopic The Testament of Ann Lee – she’s finally reaping the fruits of her labour

Somewhere in the Hudson Valley, on a patch of land obscured by bare trees and a light mist, Amanda Seyfried is howling at a peacock. “Arrgghh!” she wails with gusto. Then, for good measure, “Urrgghh!”

Crouched down in jeans, Wellington boots and an oversized black coat, Seyfried is trying to coax a courtship dance out of Kevin, a handsome homme fatale of a peacock who lords over her farm with toxic male confidence. For my sake, she pleads with Kevin: “Show him how sexy you are!”

Defeated, she turns to me. “He’s very unkind. He’s a murderer. He killed his friend,” she says. “It was over pussy.”

Over what?

“Over her,” she points to a nearby female peahen. “It was mating season.”

Welcome to Amanda Seyfried’s wonderland, a 50-acre farm with goats, donkeys, peacocks, ducks, cats and a 1930s house that she and her family live in. About a two-hour drive from Manhattan, her home is unreachable by design. “No one would know there was a farm on this road,” she says. “This is private; there’s woods; I feel so protected.”

She gives me a tour and introduces her menagerie: there’s Cliff, a pony, who gets to walk around the property as he pleases because, as the oldest animal, he’s earned the right. There’s Gus, the donkey, who was a gift from her husband (the Newsroom actor Thomas Sadoski) one Christmas. There are the horses Andre and Eddie (“Half-brothers; they came from next door”), her 16½-year-old dog Finn (“He gets two pills in the morning, two pills at night for pain”) and Brownie, a goat, who, today, seems to be shedding an endless supply of cashmere.

“Every day he has more cashmere for me,” she says, holding Brownie close to her. “Look at it! Look at all this cashmere!” As Seyfried says this, five other goats crowd around her, eager for affection.

“You’re Snow White,” I tell her.

“I am Snow White!” she says. “This is my dream!”

When their dearly departed horse Katie had intestinal problems, it was Seyfried who helped relieve the beloved mare by administering an enema with a tube and syringe. “I had to, twice a day, put a tube in,” she says, gesturing with her hands. “Then you would put this syringe into the hole of the tube and, like, put it in and then hold the tube up so it comes out, because then it’ll come in, grab some of the poop and it’ll shoot!” She laughs with relish. “Fucking disgusting, but I did that for three weeks! Twice a day!”

That image of flying poo is a world away from the other Amanda Seyfried, the one who has been acting since her teens. She was 17 when she played the delightfully ditzy Karen in Mean Girls, a low-budget high-school comedy that became a box-office hit and later, a cultural touchstone and perennial reference for everyone from Hillary Clinton to Wet Leg. It was her first film.

As she turned 40 last year, Seyfried shifted into a new register with the one-two punch of erotic psychological thriller The Housemaid, the blockbuster Freida McFadden adaptation directed by Paul Feig, and Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, a historical musical drama about the founder of the Shakers. Her projects have become more intense, better matched to her talents. The latter once again put Seyfried in Oscar contention, and the former became one of her biggest box-office hits, grossing over £300m worldwide against a £26m budget.

And yet, there is still a nagging sense that Seyfried is underrated. In January, when the Oscar nominations were announced and Seyfried’s turn in Ann Lee was snubbed, critics – and pundits on film Twitter – were indignant. “Why Did the Oscars Ignore One of 2025’s Best Movies?” blared an Us Weekly headline. “Seyfried, for the moment, might have gotten too intense, too strange, and too good for a simple trophy,” concluded Decider.

Seyfried has always felt funny about awards season: “Well, I’m just glad-handing for votes. It’s a very political aspect of [the work]. It’s a game. And to get to the table, you have to hand in some kind of performance that has people talking and appreciating it, but it’s relentless.

“Testament of Ann Lee didn’t get any nominations,” she says. “It doesn’t mean it’s the end of its life.”

But certain opportunities can still seem out of reach, like Glinda in Wicked, a role she famously auditioned for six times and didn’t get.

“That is what my career has been,” she tells me. “There’s been some highs and lows – there’s always ups and downs – but I’m still here. I’m still doing good work. I still really fucking like it.”

As she leads me round the farm – a fistful of cashmere in one hand, a box of eggs in the other – she suddenly stops in her tracks.

Leaning down to investigate something in the grass, she lights up: “It’s a four-leaf clover.” That emblem for luck, a talisman against evil. “I just want you to know they’re everywhere,” she tells me. “You just have to keep your eyes peeled.”

I first meet Seyfried at an outdoor tennis court half an hour from her home. In a loose grey jumper, black running shorts with pink trim, blond locks under a baseball cap, she easily could pass for a 20-something loitering around the country club.

“Oh my God, I almost got your dick!” she yells – not to me, thankfully, but to Jonah, her strapping tennis coach, who has set up three orange cones on the court for us to hit. “I have really bad aim,” she tells me, flashing those big blue Bette Davis eyes by way of an aw-shucks apology, then knocks down all three cones.

When I found out that Seyfried wanted to play tennis, I had a mild panic attack. The last time I picked up a racket was over a decade ago, in college, when I played for a semester. Was this hazing? Scenes from Mean Girls flashed before my eyes. Raise your hand if you have ever been personally victimised by an Oscar nominee.

Seyfried has been playing tennis since she was a teenager, and has been training with Jonah for about a year. She’s a generous doubles partner, who patiently guides me through our rally, and cheers when I occasionally do something right. “Your backhands are going in!” she says excitedly.

“She’s really just playing ping-pong or tennis,” Fastvold tells me later, on Seyfried’s approach to making art. “If there’s a goat or a child or whatever it is – something unexpected that a performer will do – she’ll always just catch it and then throw it back. And I think that purity is linked to that ability of being hyper-present – which to me is [a quality of] some of the most exciting performers.”

After an hour of tennis, we migrate to a nearby restaurant, where over breakfast, we talk about the life she’s built. “None of this is accidental,” she points out. “That’s a byproduct of the choices that I made.”

Some actors arrive with credibility; others have to earn it over time – usually because they come from genres of ill repute (like soap opera or teen comedy), and sometimes because they have the disadvantage of being incredibly good-looking. When Seyfried came on the scene in the noughties, a beautiful girl with a doll-like face, she had a start on a soap opera (As the World Turns) and then her breakthrough as Karen. It didn’t help that she made it look easy – as early as Mean Girls and the teen neo-noir Veronica Mars, Seyfried played with the push-pull between sheltered innocence and burgeoning adulthood.

She was right there when the industry turned on her Mean Girls co-star Lindsay Lohan, who was riding high as Hollywood’s hottest young thing before she was torn apart, with menacing glee, into a tabloid punchline.

“The outsized bashing is ugly,” says Seyfried. “It’s like, a fear of mine. I would not want to be spotlit for being infamous in any way.”

She seems especially protective of Lohan. “We’re almost the same age,” she says. “I also wasn’t working at that level. The spotlight was on her, no matter what she did.”

“We’ve stayed close because there’s genuine trust and respect between us,” Lohan says. “What started as shared experience has grown into a meaningful friendship over time. Now we talk more about life, motherhood and our families. She’s always someone I can rely on. That consistency is rare and something I really cherish.”

But Seyfried doesn’t give herself a star for getting out of that era relatively unscathed. “I mean, did I go clubbing? Yeah,” she says. “Did I find myself at Val Kilmer’s house one night at 1am with [Mean Girls co-stars] Daniel Franzese and Jonathan Bennett? Did I find myself there with them in the pool? I was 18 and I had just moved to LA and we had gone to a screening of Reefer Madness. I was at Val Kilmer’s house – I don’t even remember meeting him, but I was at his house.”

“My 20s were ridiculous,” she continues. “I found myself at many places. I also remember there was a time I could have done cocaine for the first time at the Chateau [Marmont], and I didn’t because I was scared. And so there was a limit to how much partying I was going to do, because I only wanted to be so drunk that I could [still] get myself home,” she says. (In the past, she’s talked about how her obsessive-compulsive disorder inadvertently stopped her from partying too hard. “I would make plans and then just not go,” she told Vogue.)

Early in Seyfried’s career, she was sometimes penalised for her idiosyncratic taste in material. Her 2009 films Jennifer’s Body, the Diablo Cody horror comedy about a literal maneater, and Chloe, the Atom Egoyan erotic thriller where she played a sex worker who wreaks havoc on Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson’s marriage, came out in the same year to tepid reviews and disappointing box-office numbers. US film critic Roger Ebert called the former “Twilight for boys”, and The New Yorker branded the latter an “unsmiling porno-farce”.

But time has validated Seyfried on both counts. Today, Jennifer’s Body is celebrated as a feminist cult classic, and Chloe is seen as an early dramatic highlight in her career. In these roles, Seyfried mined the perceived purity that comes with her delicate looks, only to show us the devastation of paradise lost.

In 2012, Seyfried took the role of Cosette in Tom Hooper’s version of Les Misérables, a project that left her feeling vulnerable in the public eye. As recently as a few years ago, she told interviewers she still had “nightmares” about her singing and had “complete regret” about her performance. Today, the confidence she’s found in her own voice is unexpected, given those comments. “I was singing with all these people who sounded like I wanted to sound,” she says, about co-stars Eddie Redmayne, Anne Hathaway and Samantha Barks. “I know what I want to hear and I don’t hear it when I sing it. Well… I didn’t.” She was on the awards campaign for Les Misérables when, out of nowhere, a backlash suddenly formed around Anne Hathaway, so prevalent that it earned its own cutesy moniker: “Hathahate”. (“I don’t remember why [people were mad at Anne],” Seyfried says, shaking her head).

Soon after, a grizzled Hollywood veteran of 11 years at the age of 26, she bought this property in Hudson Valley, realising she wanted to escape her paparazzi-plagued existence in big cities. “I always wanted a bucolic life. I always wanted to have a farm,” she says. “I was always searching for an out.”

Just a year later, Seyfried was at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival to promote Lovelace, in which she played the notorious and misunderstood star of adult film Deep Throat. In a photo on the red carpet, Seyfried stands in front of a swarm of paparazzi, posing in an exaggerated shrug, an “all this over little ol’ me?” expression on her face.

Reposted ad nauseam on Twitter, reblogged countless times on Tumblr, the photo was seen as proof that Seyfried had mastered something about celebrity-paparazzi relations that her peers had not. As other female stars cowered in fear or embraced notoriety, she seemed to have figured out a way to give just enough, without relinquishing control. “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” Buzzfeed captioned the picture. “Amanda is great at being a celebrity,” concluded a blogger for The Film Experience.

When I bring up that photo today, Seyfried seems confused. If anything, she tells me, she was always scared to make a misstep. “Honestly, I did have that fucking period of time where I would almost get into accidents because I was trying to outsmart the fucking paparazzi who would camp on my street,” she says. “And it was really not just frustrating, but incredibly infuriating that I would have to outrun these guys.”

The Lovelace role was also Seyfried’s way of advertising her willingness to get weird. “I deliberately chose to kind of do a big swing in terms of what I think the industry expected of me,” she says. “I wanted to secure some kind of place where I was considered someone who was willing and able to do anything – or at least wasn’t afraid to make movies about people with weird, sketchy stories.”

It didn’t happen overnight, but Seyfried started getting calls from big-time directors. Paul Schrader’s austere late-career triumph First Reformed lands that much harder because Seyfried’s virtue provides the promise of salvation for Ethan Hawke’s tormented priest. “There’s something old-school about her,” Hawke says. “She’s smart and not pretentious – it’s a great combination. She’s beautiful without believing that gives her permission to be uninteresting.”

Then, in 2019, David Fincher cast her in Mank as silent film star Marion Davies, the knowing but ultimately ill-fated artist who subsumed her professional ambitions for love as the mistress of the tycoon William Randolph Hearst. The role seemed to be the apotheosis of the archetype Seyfried had come to perfect. Once again, she plumbed the heartbreak of the actress after the fall, as Davies comes to accept that she might never be taken seriously as a performer.

The performance earned Seyfried an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, and in hindsight, marked a turning point in her career. After Mank, she would never again be perceived as a lightweight.

“I think Amanda is (maybe) a bit misunderstood,” Fincher writes in an email. “I find people who are that physically beautiful are often written off as having circumnavigated or are perhaps (secretly) inured to the experience of ‘struggle.’ One of Marion’s most obvious physical traits were her amazing eyes – I started with that – but began looking at [Seyfried’s] work through the lens of: ‘When does she evoke – even extremely subtly – her dissatisfaction with being relegated to ‘less’ than her actual capability…’ and I saw it in a lot of her work. She subtly bristles at being diminished in any way. And I came to feel I needed her.”

She followed Mank up with the 2022 series The Dropout, playing the tech grifter Elizabeth Holmes in a turn so transformative and definitive that Jennifer Lawrence pulled out of her own Elizabeth Holmes project. “Yeah, we don’t need to redo that,” Lawrence told the New York Times. “She did it.”

During our afternoon together, Seyfried comes across as a willing collaborator in the profile industrial complex. She’s a voracious swearer, who can talk about perimenopause, osteoporosis, her obsession with colonoscopies and her fear of fatal ski accidents all in the course of an hour.

But as funny and meandering a conversationalist as she is, Seyfried is also always firmly in control of the situation. I don’t get to ask a single question until I’ve survived an hour on the tennis court. When I pass that test, she says, “I think it’s cool that you’re just like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing but I’ll jump in and have fun.’” She steers me through her world as nimbly and warmly as she would one of her goats.

Even after this long in the industry, and this far out in Hudson Valley, press firestorms never feel that far off. Last year, Seyfried saw Sydney Sweeney, her Housemaid co-star, inspire intense controversy with her American Eagle ads touting “good jeans”, which led to all sorts of speculation around Sweeney’s political affiliations. I tell her that it must’ve made promoting The Housemaid complicated.

“We had a great time on the press tour,” she tells me. “We worked really hard and she seemed to be having fun, but I also understood that probably it can’t be fucking easy, where she found herself… I have heard her stand up for herself, but I think she found herself between a rock and a hard place.”

How did she provide support to her co-star? I ask.

“I’m just there,” Seyfried says. “I don’t talk to her about it unless she wants to talk about it. I don’t want to be a source of anything, but whatever you need. You need some fun, you need to laugh, you need cake with me? That’s fine… at the same time, I’m like, ‘We’ve got to promote this movie and I can be a safe space.’”

Even in the middle of a maelstrom, she tells me, Sweeney was thoughtful, even celebrating Seyfried’s birthday. “She brought me all these cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery and gave me this most beautiful bracelet,” she says.

Last year, Seyfried had a taste of controversy herself. Responding to an Instagram Reel compiling some of the murdered right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s most appalling statements, she commented: “He was hateful.” Almost immediately, that one sentence kicked off a brutal backlash from Kirk’s supporters, accusing her of implying that his murder was justified.

Seyfried later posted a separate statement on Instagram saying: “I can get angry about misogyny and racist rhetoric and ALSO very much agree that Charlie Kirk’s murder was absolutely disturbing and deplorable in every way imaginable.” Later, she said in a Who What Wear interview: “I’m not fucking apologising for that… what I said was pretty damn factual, and I’m free to have an opinion, of course.”

Talking about it today, Seyfried is still in disbelief: “A, I’m allowed to fucking voice my feelings, and B, do it in a way that’s not unkind necessarily. But there’s just an outsized fear and hatred and impulse to bash and to tear down. And I experienced a very small fraction of that.”

“I want my kids to be able to feel safe to voice their opinions as long as they’re not harmful,” she continues. “So I’m like, ‘What do I do? What do I say?’ And then all of a sudden I find myself with a fucking bodyguard at the airport and I’m like, ‘This is crazy.’”

With the tumult of a very public life, the farm functions as a stabilising force. There is, after all, nothing more grounding than horse shit. The place also recently received a certification as a nonprofit rescue farm. For that, Seyfried works with Shannon, the farm’s full-time caretaker, who’s been with them since the early days. “She’s literally the reason I can have a farm,” Seyfried says.

I meet Shannon near the chicken coop. In faded jeans and a grey Harley-Davidson hoodie, with pink streaks at the ends of her hazel hair, she looks straight out of a Chrome Hearts catalogue. The topic turns to a duck that’s laid some eggs.

“Did you see all the eggs?” she asks Amanda. “We need to take them.”

“We don’t want her to have babies,” Seyfried explains.

“It’s such a moral dilemma,” Shannon tells me.

“I’m not going to take them yet,” Seyfried decides.

Talking to Seyfried, it’s clear that this new era of her career has been made possible by the community around her. Seyfried raises her two kids – aged nine and five – with her husband and her mother, who lives with them. “Now, it’s imbalanced, because I have been off back and forth,” she says, alluding to the effects of a banner year.

She recognises that her husband is an ambitious artist too, with creative pursuits and a big life of his own. “My kids are OK because my husband has fucking sacrificed a lot for me the last year,” she says. “He’s the best dad ever, and he’s very present, but he needs to fucking be an artist too.”

“That’s the thing about having family,” she says. “It’s like, someone has to eat a little bit of shit and it doesn’t feel good for either person. But the best thing about any family unit or relationship is that you talk about it and you communicate.”

The next challenge is already nearing: this summer, Seyfried is making the film adaptation of Dave Malloy’s 2019 off-Broadway sensation Octet, an a cappella chamber choir piece on modern technological dread. The film will be directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda – his follow-up to the award-winning Tick, Tick… Boom! – and co-star Rachel Zegler, Jonathan Groff and Sheryl Lee Ralph.

“I can’t wait,” she says. “The best thing about this project, for me, is the entire rehearsal process. First of all, we have a rehearsal process, and the entire rehearsal process is being done as if it was theatre. So we’re doing eight hours [of rehearsals daily] and then we have a week of tech, and then the film crew comes in and we shoot.”

Through 25 years and more than 60 films and TV shows, she still seems to have access to the enthusiasm of a neophyte. “I don’t know what it’s going to be, who’s going to see it, when it’s going to come out – I don’t give a fuck,” she says. “What I care about is making the most of this delicious two-month period where I’m going to be a theatre actor and I’m going to be singing in unison a cappella, with seven other unbelievable artists, in a room with Lin.”

That earnestness goes hand in hand with a willingness to sweat in public, to try hard, to get a bit weird sometimes. “I can’t speak to [David] Lynch or [Paul] Schrader, but I think most directors are looking for someone who wants to ‘dive in,’” says Fincher.

“There’s nothing calculated about her career choices,” says Fastvold. “It’s just really what she feels like doing. That gives for a very interesting career.”

In the same way, Seyfried stumbled on a genuinely viral moment last year, singing a 54-year-old song on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

She was promoting Long Bright River, a miniseries in which she stars as a police officer in a city ravaged by the opioid crisis, and in a classic late-night-show bit, she was asked if she plays any instruments. Fallon brought out the dulcimer, and with the memory of the 2025 Southern California wildfires fresh in her mind, Seyfried sang part of Joni Mitchell’s “California”. “I would love to play something about a state which deserves a lot of love right now,” she said.

Dulcimer in hand, she performed a pitch-perfect rendition, not easy when you’re going note-for-note with Mitchell’s ’70s-era soprano. “Are you kidding me?” Fallon yelled out in excitement, leaping out of his seat. He later said, “It was one of the most viral videos that ever went out of our show in the history of our show.”

“The reason it was so viral was because it wasn’t meant to be,” Seyfried says now. “And because it was happy.”

The moment earned her praise from the most unexpected sources – including Beck, the Grammy-winning musician, whom she bumped into on the Upper West Side in New York. “I was walking a block,” says Seyfried. “He jumped out of a car and he was like, ‘You were so great. My daughter has been learning to play that.’ And I was like, ‘This is fucking great.’ And we had a great conversation. I don’t know him, I’ve never met him before. Fucking musician Beck? Like, thank you, sir.”

What the audience didn’t know was that Seyfried had learned to play the dulcimer during the pandemic, while preparing for a Joni Mitchell biopic that she was attached to. “It was a movie about her and [manager] Elliot Roberts,” she says. “Then he died – but not before I met him.”

She also met Mitchell at her house in Los Angeles.

“I sat on the floor petting one of the dogs,” Seyfried says. “She told me a lot of stories.” They shared a steak dinner, and then Mitchell put on Blue, the record widely regarded as Mitchell’s masterpiece and one of the greatest albums ever. “She’s like, ‘We’ll put on the album and light a fire,’” Seyfried says. “After we listened to the album, she’s like, ‘It’s sparse, isn’t it?’” Seyfried feigns fainting. “It’s perfect!”

As the world shut down, Seyfried locked in and learned to play all of Blue – alternating between piano, guitar and dulcimer – as well as Mitchell classics “The Circle Game” and “Both Sides Now”. “The day that I finished learning the last song on the album, ‘[The Last Time I Saw] Richard’, I fucking wept,” Seyfried says. “I felt like a bona fide musician, like I belong here. I felt like I had put my own flag on the top of the mountain. Because it was a fucking mountain, I tell you.”

But the project never came together, and, reportedly, Cameron Crowe is directing a different Joni Mitchell biopic. (“Apparently a lot of people reached out to Cameron Crowe and were like, ‘What the fuck are you doing, dude?’” Seyfried says. “I don’t know what he said, but from my knowledge, his version is, she’s really young and then she’s older.”)

In an era where effortlessness is prized and a frictionless existence seems to be the aspiration, Seyfried isn’t afraid to show the seams, to show the sweat – even, in the case of today, the manure. “It’s in my nature,” she says, “the desperate need to be understood and to be seen.”

Back at her home, Seyfried invites me in, and we end up in her kitchen, sipping sparkling water from the fridge. There’s a tank on one of the islands, and she walks over to it and pulls out a bearded dragon. “The tour can’t end without Romeo,” she says, holding the reptile close to her chest.

Seyfried’s relationship to her voice changed during the year she spent preparing for The Testament of Ann Lee. Playing a character who sang to express her faith, she had to unlearn her musical theatre training. “It’s not performative,” Fastvold told her, about the singing required. “It has to be imperfect… sometimes it has to be screamed, sometimes it has to be whispered.”

During rehearsals, Fastvold would turn off the lights and Seyfried would lie on the floor and sing. In the dark, she would imagine singing through the pain of giving birth, the contentment of singing to her baby, the intimacy of singing to a lover. “Please take away that beauty,” Fastvold would urge. “Bring your voice into your gut.”

That process unlocked something in Seyfried. Now, she says, “I don’t have to sound like everybody else.”

Styling by Daniel Gaines
Tailoring by Todd Thomas
Make-up by Genevieve Herr
Hair by Serge Normant
Nails by Yukie Miyakawa
Set design by Mat Cullen
Production by Tightrope Production
Models, Kennedy Baxter at Ricky Michiels Management and Billy Lang
Animals provided by All Creatures Great & Small, New York
No animals were harmed in the production of this feature

Via: GQ