May 4, 2010 by Susan King [Link]

In THE HBO series “Big Love,” Amanda Seyfried plays the eldest daughter in a polygamist family of one husband and three wives. In the lavish new musical “Mamma Mia!,” based on the long-running Broadway hit, she plays the only daughter of one mother and one of three boyfriends.

In the movie that features the music of ’70s band ABBA as prominently as any of its stars, Seyfried plays Sophie, the daughter of single mom Donna (Meryl Streep), who operates a small hotel on a beautiful Greek island. For Sophie’s wedding, Donna invites her BFFs (Christine Baranski, Julie Walters) who were the backup singers of her old group, Donna and the Dynamos. Meanwhile, Sophie secretly invites the three guys (Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard) who may or may not be her father.

Singing was Seyfried’s first passion and she trained from age 11 to 17 in her hometown of Allentown, Pa. “When I moved to New York, I quit because I was acting regularly on ‘All My Children.’ I didn’t have time for it.”

Although Streep sang in “A Prairie Home Companion” and “Postcards From the Edge,” most of the actors were out of their comfort zone. “We were all a little bit freaked out by it,” Seyfried says. “I was the least freaked; I knew how to sing and dance and I was basically playing myself in these certain circumstances.”

But her three “daddies,” she says, were often horrified. “The look on their faces the first day they showed up to dance was just priceless. The facial expressions Colin Firth had were so funny.”

The movie, opening July 18, was shot in London and Greece. “It was so beautiful,” Seyfried says by phone from the Vancouver, Canada, set of her latest film, “Jennifer’s Body,” penned by “Juno” Oscar-winner Diablo Cody.

“But it was hectic and tiring. We worked six days a week . . . the entire company partied every time we had a day off.”

July 14, 2010 by Chris Ball [Link]

Catherine (Julianne Moore) suspects her husband, David (Liam Neeson), of cheating. Once inseparable, they’ve drifted apart, with parenting, busy careers and other interests interfering with intimacy.

Catherine has her reasons for being suspicious, but in order to be sure, she takes a huge risk and asks a pretty young prostitute to come on to David.

Moore is quite good as the worrying wife. Neeson, always fine, is a bit too much of a nice guy to be a believable philanderer.

What makes this erotic 2009 drama memorable is Amanda Seyfried as Chloe, the helpful hooker. Seyfried, who is getting some plum film roles since her big break as the eldest daughter in the HBO series “Big Love,” is expressive, intelligent, beautiful and likable. Here’s hoping we see more of her soon.

“Chloe” is a remake of the 2003 French film “Nathalie” starring Gerard Depardieu, Fanny Ardant and Emmanuelle Beart.

R, 96 minutes. DVD and Blu-ray extras: deleted scenes, a making-of featurette and commentary with director Atom Egoyan, Seyfried and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson. From Sony. In stores Tuesday, July 13.

June 30, 2008 by Monique Jessen [Link]

Mamma Mia! star Amanda Seyfried gets very excited if you mention a certain British actor and a former Bond man.

“He’s so sexy, Colin Firth, so sexy [and] will always be,” Seyfried, 22, told Entertainment Tonight as she giggled about her Mamma Mia! costar.

And she feels equally as lucky when it comes to sharing the screen with another handsome actor: Pierce Brosnan.

“Shooting in the summer of ‘07 on the 007 [sound]stage with a 007, that’s one of the things he said to me, and I was like, ‘You’re right, I am lucky,’ because he’s a studly, studly man!” the actress says.

Seyfried plays Meryl Streep’s daughter in the film inspired by the music of ABBA and based on the hit starge musical. Firth and Brosnan both play Streep’s ex-boyfriends – one of which could be the father of Seyfried’s character. The film is out July 18.

“I can’t help smiling. I have all these amazing people in my life now from the movie,” says Seyfried, who also costars in the HBO series Big Love and starred opposite Lindsay Lohan in the teen hit Mean Girls.

The young actress admits she was nervous to meet Streep for the first time.

“I almost fainted because it was such a big deal for her to accept me, especially playing her daughter,” Seyfried says. “She is the most gracious, graceful woman I have ever met in my life.”

March 17, 2010 by Suzanne Zuckerman [Link]

In Chloe, Julianne Moore’s character hires a prostitute played by Amanda Seyfried to tempt her possibly cheating husband (Liam Neeson). What ensues is a much-buzzed-about sex scene between the two women. So how did the actors prepare to lose their inhibitions? Tequila shots? Group therapy? Turns out it was all pretty technical.

“Was it different because it was [with] a girl? No,” Moore told reporters in New York Monday about her onscreen tryst with Seyfried. “Whenever you have an intimate scene with somebody, you’re very prepared. Everyone knows exactly what’s happening and it’s usually very choreographed … Amanda and I were comfortable with each other.”

Moore, 49, went on to call her 24-year-old costar “lovely” and “quite impressive.” But it wasn’t such a clear-cut call for Seyfried, who admits to being so “intimidated” she tried to back out of the movie.

“The risk factor came with the fact that the nudity could potentially create some damage with my American audience,” she said. Still, “I had to do it. It was clearly the riskier choice but I think the better choice.”

Now, Seyfried rates it as her most memorable moment on the set. “The love scene,” she said. “I’ll never forget that.”

Director Atom Egoyan just shrugged off the hubbub: “They are actors. They use their bodies to express feeling. That’s what their job is about,” he said. Besides, “It’s a great scene and my favorite moment in the film perhaps.”

July 12, 2010 by Pamela McClintock [Link]

Amanda Seyfried wants to become immortal.

The actress is set to topline New Regency’s sci-fi action thriller, “I’m.mortal,” from writer-director Andrew Niccol. Twentieth Century Fox will distribute the film, also described as an action love story.

“I’m.mortal” revolves around a society in which aging stops at the age of 25–meaning that every role in “mortal” will be played by actors in their mid-20s.

New Regency picked up the high-priority project this spring. Niccol is expected to begin lensing this year.

Eric Newman and Marc Abraham are producing via their Strike Entertainment. Strike’s Kristel Laiblin is exec producing.

In “I’m.mortal,” time has become the currency. Once you turn 25 and your aging gene turns off, you must buy and bank time. If you are rich enough, you can live forever. But if you run out of time, you are engineered to die automatically.

When a rebel from the ghetto is falsely accused of murdering a wealthy man for his time, he is forced to go on the run with a beautiful, rich hostage (Seyfried). Together, this duo rages against the system, living minute to minute. They discover that love is more powerful than all the time in the world.

Seyfried (“Mamma Mia!”) stars in Warner Bros.’ upcoming “Red Riding Hood,” from director Catherine Hardwicke. She was last in theaters with “Letters to Juliet” and “Dear John.”

Lead male hasn’t yet been cast.

The male lead in “I’m.mortal” hasn’t yet been cast.

Niccol’s previous directing/writing credits include “Gattaca” and “Lord of War.” He also wrote “The Truman Show.”

“I’m.mortal” isn’t the only sci-fi film project broaching the subject of a future where people don’t age, causing issues of overpopulation.

A remake of “Logan’s Run” has been in the works for more than a decade at Warner Bros. That film focuses on a man trying to escape a mandatory death sentence on his 30th birthday.

“It’s a strange casting process. Even for a small role like a priest or a pawnbroker, where you would normally cast a 75-year-old character actor, I have to find a 75-year-old character actor in a 25-year old body,” Niccol told Daily Variety.

Seyfried is repped by Innovative Artists.

July 12, 2010 by Terri Schwartz [Link]

Amanda Seyfried has been all over the supernatural spectrum recently, first opposite Megan Fox in “Jennifer’s Body,” then in the upcoming “Girl With The Red Riding Hood,” and now, according to Variety, as the lead in the sci-fi thriller “I’m.mortal.” The film is written and will be directed by Andrew Niccol of “Gattaca” and “The Truman Show” fame.

The story follows a society where people stop aging at 25. After then, people have to buy and bank “time” to continue to live forever. This is no problem for the rich, but the poor end up dying because they are engineered to die when their time runs out.

A rebel gets falsely charged for murdering a wealthy man for his time, so he takes a rich girl — played by Amanda — as his hostage.

July 6, 2010 by Monika Bartyzel [Link]

Hollywood’s been busy casting moms:

First up, Variety reports that Virginia Madsen has signed on to play Amanda Seyfried’s mother in the upcoming medieval thriller Red Riding Hood. Nothing new is being said about the Catherine Hardwicke film, nor anything specific about the role, but it’s just one more piece in an increasingly interesting puzzle. While it must just be more dark fare to follow in Twilight’s footsteps, you might remember that this project already has the likes of Julie Christie and Gary Oldman attached, not to mention Lukas Haas and Shiloh Fernandez. Now if only Hollywood could give Ms. Madsen roles that give her something other than parenting to do… But at least she’s in good company with this one.

Hit the jump to see a mom for the Team Jacob contingent.

In a second piece of blonde-mom news, THR’s Risky Business reports that Elisabeth Rohm will take over for Emily Mortimer as Taylor Lautner’s biological mother in Abduction. I’m really interested to see who the dad will be to offer up Lautner’s, well, non-light-skinned-blonde look. Perhaps it’s a matter of personality for mom and son. His Twilight Jacob could surely challenge her old Detective Lockley (Angel) for supreme annoying one.

RB’s synopsis makes it sound like a normal drama — a young guy hits the road when he sees his baby picture on a missing persons website and realizes mom and dad aren’t really his parents. But this is Mr. Ripply Pec Action Boy Lautner, and this discovery doesn’t set him on a path of personal discovery, so much as huge action with KGB and CIA peeps, according to other reports.

May 2010 by Danielle Nussbaum [Link]

It’s 3 p.m. on a gorgeous sunny day in Los Angeles, and Amanda Seyfried is sitting at an outdoor café, wearing a light-blue long-sleeve button-down and shorts, her signature glamorously wavy blond hair peeking out from a mustard-yellow cable-knit cap that she made herself. In a bag on the table is a DIY dog-collar kit for Finn, her blue-eyed Australian shepherd who lies lazily at her feet. The actress isn’t hiding under huge sunglasses, sitting in a dark corner, or ignoring the passersby who stop to pet her adorable pup. (In fact, she’s chatting them up, making it difficult for anyone to get a word in edgewise.)

Amanda is the rare young star who has managed to continue to thrive in Hollywood despite having no background in anything remotely Disney or Nickelodeon, and in case you haven’t noticed, she’s having a moment. In the past year, the 24-year-old actress from Allentown, Pennsylvania, has hit a movie genre trifecta—Dear John, a Nicholas Sparks tearjerker; Chloe, an indie thriller; and this month’s rom-com Letters to Juliet. And beyond the occasional red carpet and the Oscars, where she presented alongside Miley Cyrus, the paparazzi have generally left her alone. The closest they’ve gotten are a few snaps of the actress with beau (and Mamma Mia! costar) Dominic Cooper, although one guy was daring enough to follow Amanda and Finn on a recent six-mile hike.

“I don’t really care about paparazzi—like, I’m not wearing makeup right now and I should be—but when someone follows me around on a day like that, a really wonderful, beautiful day . . .” she trails off. “Had I known he was there, I would have been really upset.” Amanda’s going to have to get used to it.

A breakout role as Sophie in 2008’s Mamma Mia!, alongside Meryl Streep, launched the career of the actress, who got her start on daytime soaps As the World Turns and All My Children, but it was her big-screen debut as the ditzy Karen in Mean Girls that first made audiences take notice. “People still come up to me and say, ‘You were really funny in that,’ and I’m like, It’s not me. Tina Fey wrote everything I said!” she says, laughing. “I think I impressed a lot of people in Mean Girls. I don’t know how I pulled that off.”

Proving that her comedy chops weren’t just a fluke (or a gift from Tina Fey), Amanda shined as the nerdy Needy in last year’s Diablo Cody–written horror-com, Jennifer’s Body. Though it didn’t exactly blow up the box office, the film catapulted her into the spotlight. At the end of 2009, she announced that this past season of the HBO drama Big Love would be her last. And after Dear John made over $30 million in its opening weekend, Amanda moved from actress to star. Letters to Juliet is sure to make her a bona fide celebrity.

In it, Amanda plays Sophie, a young woman who travels to Verona, Italy, the home of fiction’s most well-known tragic couple, Romeo and Juliet. Sophie finds an unanswered love letter and chases down it’s owner, Claire (played by Vanessa Redgrave), in an attempt to make things right.

One would think that starring in two heartstring-tugging films in a year would turn even the most unemotional realist into a romantic. For Amanda, whose parents have been together for almost 30 years, that’s simply not the case. “It’s fun to play characters who have these ideals that you don’t have. Like, in Dear John, Channing [Tatum] and I had such a good time because we were pretending to be in love,” she says, but even though Letters to Juliet was “very romantically shot in a very romantic place,” it didn’t change her perspective. “A lot of people ask me, ‘Is Dominic the one?’ I don’t know, and I’m fine with that. Too much planning can lead to heartbreak. Love is great and possible, always, but it’s very rare to have the feeling that ‘I want to be with this person forever.’”

Lest we peg Amanda as a stone-cold cynic and revoke her membership in Hallmark’s card of the month club, she does melt a little when she talks about her past relationships. “I can’t remember if he said I love you first, or if I did,” she says of her first serious boyfriend, Micah Alberti from All My Children, at age seventeen. “But I do remember when my ex Jesse said it to me. It took my breath away.”

Her passion is most evident, though, when she talks about her craft, especially the process of deciding whether or not to sign on to a movie. For her next two films, Albert Nobbs and The Girl With the Red Riding Hood, Amanda fell head over heels for the directors (Rodrigo García and Twilight’s Catherine Hardwicke, respectively) and said yes to both projects almost immediately. This impulsive creativity might make life hard for her agent, whom Amanda has been with since day one, but it’s a good demonstration of the driving force that makes her performances so vibrant.

“I had no idea if I wanted to do Red Riding Hood, but I sat with Catherine for, like, two and a half hours that first day, and she was amazing,” Amanda remembers. “She is who should be a big Hollywood director, making cool-ass movies. She has such an imagination. I was like, OK, I’m doing it. Done.” And that was before Amanda had even read the script.

When she’s not filming, Amanda spends a lot of time at her piano, a gift from Letters to Juliet director Gary Winick, which has inspired the classically trained singer—who has written a song with Damien Rice and contributed songs to the Mamma Mia! and Dear John soundtracks— to return to her musical roots.

These days she’s listening to a lot of A.A. Bondy and Deer Tick.

After a chance meeting with singer/songwriter Joshua Radin at the Soho Hotel in London a few months ago, Amanda agreed to record a duet with him, but she has no intention of making this her full-time, or even part-time, career. “I love being the background voice,” she says. “But I’m not interested in being in the spotlight.” The actress, who lists Miu Miu, Stella McCartney, and Alexander Wang as some of her favorite designers, is equally as chill about her personal style, describing it as “comfortable and simple with a little edge.”

That’s pretty much Amanda’s M.O. There was some drama earlier this year when the blogs (falsely) reported that she was being difficult about committing to a Mamma Mia! sequel, holding out for more money, but in reality, she is as low maintenance as it gets. And she has a strict “no expectations” philosophy that keeps her grounded and has solidified her reputation as one of Hollywood’s most down-to-earth glamour girls: “I am successful now, and it’s wonderful. But the reason it is so wonderful is because I didn’t expect it to happen.”

July 9, 2010 [Link]

Mama Mia actress Amanda Seyfried wants a career similar to two-time Oscar winning actress
Meryl Streep.

The Dear John actress, who shared the screen space with Streep in Mama Mia, claims she would like to tread a career path similar to veteran star, although admits so would many others in her profession, Total Film magazine reported.

“I would like to be one of those actresses who can do anything. I would like to be like Meryl Streep some day, but then I don’t know many people in this business who don’t have that goal,” Seyfried said.

Discussing her upcoming appearance as the titular character in Catherine Hardwicke’s big screen adaptation of Red Riding Hood, Sefried said it will be different from what many expect.

“Catherine has a very vivid, clear idea, a beautiful idea of what she wants us to be. Very gothic, very dark and unlike Twilight,” she said.

Seyfried will star alongside Gary Oldman, Julie Christie and Lukas Haas, which is due for release in April 2011.

February 1, 2010 by Omar P.L. Moore [Link]

Amanda Seyfried (pronounced “Sigh-frid”) admits it: she’s insecure. And it’s that mix of insecurity and talent that has helped to get her to where she is. We often picture celebrities as confident, self-contained beings — although many of us clearly know better.

That said, Miss Seyfried, 24, has a career some may envy: she’s on television (HBO’s “Big Love”). She dabbles in music (contributing songs to some of her movies). After last year’s “Jennifer’s Body” she has three new movies on the way — the soon-to-be released “Chloe” (in the title role as the woman hired to monitor Julianne Moore’s onscreen husband Liam Neeson). And there’s “Letters To Juliet” (in May) and “Dear John”, which opens on Friday in the U.S. and Canada.

The actress said she didn’t read Nicholas (The Notebook) Sparks’ book of the same name when preparing to act in “Dear John”, which is directed by Lasse Hallström (“The Cider House Rules”). A love story at heart, the film is about the relationship between Savannah (Miss Seyfried) and John (Channing Tatum), who has to make a choice between going off to fight in a war after September 2001 and staying by the side of the woman he loves.

“I knew the book was a little bit different from the script, especially my character,” Miss Seyfried said to four journalists assembled here while awaiting a jolt of joe to get her morning moving. “She’s really strong-headed, but in so many more ways in the book that I think that the way she was portrayed in the script was more relatable for me and for hopefully everybody. We need to really like (Savannah), otherwise the love story is not going to play well for you.”

Laughing nervously at her own comment, Miss Seyfried then declared with comic timing: “I still haven’t read the book. I don’t think I need to at this point.”

Miss Seyfried, who has her own Twitter page and, to her chagrin, many imitators (at last count 14), also has a long-distance relationship with the British actor Dominic Cooper, whom she met on the set of the film “Mamma Mia!” Mr. Cooper can currently be seen in the film “An Education”. The two have been dating since 2008.

The Pennsylvania-born actress talked about family and how Charleston, South Carolina, where “Dear John” was shot, impacted her. “I can get really emotional talking about my family because I just love them so much and I feel like my life is really full. And when I got to Charleston I realized that I’m actually living in the wrong place — in L.A. — I realized . . . the capacity I have to be inspired (in Charleston) is just like, is huge. And I just realized that living in Charleston, it was just a real gift for me, and for everyone else.”

Having levity helps a performance in a serious film, according to Miss Seyfried, who opined that “when you’re doing a serious movie, I think the more you play around when the camera’s not rolling, the better you are at accessing the serious, emotional pieces of you.”

Of Mr. Tatum, she said: “I realize that Channing is probably the ultimate co-star for anybody because he’s real. And he happens to be very successful and gorgeous and all that stuff and a lot of that is who he really is.”

The actress, who got her big screen start in the smash hit 2005 film “Mean Girls” says she wants to do a comedy and a period film. She acknowledged her own envy at Nicole Kidman and Gwyneth Paltrow for starring in Mr. Hallström’s next film “The Danish Girl”, coveting the roles the two Oscar-winning actors will play.

“Chan was going to play a woman. And I was going to play the other woman”, Miss Seyfried joked.

With all the films and TV work and being on the just-released cover of the March 2010 Vanity Fair magazine, how does a 24-year-old film star maintain perspective?

Miss Seyfried credits her family’s love and support, time off between projects and the sacrifices she’s made to attain the successful career she has.

“I’m also really insecure and that makes it easy not to take anything too seriously,” she chuckled as her coffee finally arrived. “Because if you do then you just kill yourself. Perspective is just easy.”

Miss Seyfried quickly reconsiders.

“Maybe for younger people it’s difficult when your ass is being kissed all the time, but your ass is being kissed for reasons that don’t mean anything. It’s easy for me. I have really good people in my life. I have a good dog.” (Finn is four months old, an Aussie Shepherd, “and I miss him like crazy”, Miss Seyfried admits.)

“I’m actually proud of this movie,” the actress declares. Miss Seyfried was happy, if not surprised, that Mr. Hallström was so relaxed and playful during the filming of “Dear John”.

“He’ll be like on the Internet looking up stuff, and the assistant director will say, ‘come on guys, we’re ready to roll.’ And Lasse (pronounced Lah-suh) and Chan and I would be looking up stuff and laughing. Lasse’s a kid. I don’t know if it’s because he’s Swedish, or just like, open mind, heart. Anybody that can connect to that youth in themselves is like, so attractive.”

As Amanda Seyfried leaves for another round of interviews, she says with a smile: “Have fun with Channing. Ask him about his penis.”