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Interview: Amanda Seyfried
(Singing and) Dancing Queen

Amanda Seyfried didn’t grow up on ABBA and had never seen the stage version of Mamma Mia! But this girl can sing and dance, which was enough to put her on a Greek island, going toe-to-toe with Pierce Brosnan and Meryl Streep


By Bob Strauss

Amanda Seyfried has been up all night. Not misbehaving like her old Mean Girls co-star Lindsay Lohan, but working hard on the Vancouver set of Jennifer’s Body, the hotly anticipated scary movie written by Juno’s Oscar-winning scribe Diablo Cody.

 

Meryl Streep (left) with Amanda Seyfried in Mamma Mia!

 This after she sang and danced her heart out in Mamma Mia!, the movie version of the popular ABBA stage show. She plays young Sophie, who secretly invites three older men to her Greek island wedding in the hopes of determining which one of them is her father. Meryl Streep plays Sophie’s mom Donna, who has no idea her daughter has tracked down her three former lovers, and no idea which one is Sophie’s dad. As in the stage version, most scenes are punctuated with an appropriate musical number featuring the songs of Sweden’s most famous popsters, including “Honey, Honey,” “Chiquitita” and “Dancing Queen.”

 

That’s some demanding work. But Seyfried, a 22-year-old former child model and soap opera actress (All My Children and As the World Turns), couldn’t be more pleasantly exhausted. “I feel like I need a wheelchair. I have, like, no energy,” she says over the phone from Vancouver.

 
Well, you wanted to be a movie star.
“I know. I love it. It’s like, this is the best year ever. I love going to work every day. I hate being off. If I sound depressed, it’s because I have the day off!”

Tell us a little about Jennifer’s Body.
“It’s a horror movie, so there are a lot of special effects. But it’s a comedy as well, so it’s pretty unique. If you can compare it to anything, it’s like Shaun of the Dead. Obviously, the stories are different. But it’s sooo funny; it’s not one of those structured, boring horror movies.”

You’re not the body, though.
“No, Megan Fox is Jennifer. I play Needy, and Needy mainly has to save the town from Jennifer after she gets possessed and starts eating boys.”

Sounds like a far cry from Mamma Mia! Though that movie seems to have a lot of things going on: singing, dancing, romance, paternity…
“Yeah, there’s everything involved; jumping off cliffs as well. Singing was my first love and I never even considered it after I started acting, but now I’m bringing it back into my life. I trained from the ages of 11 to 17. When I moved to New York and got into serious acting, I just kind of abandoned the whole singing thing. But when I grew up in Pennsylvania I went to voice lessons once a week.”

Tell us more about your early life.
“I went back and forth between Manhattan and my hometown [Allentown] on a bus since I was 10, doing modelling for kids clothes and book covers and stuff. I got into that because a second cousin of mine was a model, and it was fun and glamorous for a young girl. My modelling agency sent me out on acting gigs, I ended up getting one and that was the beginning of the rest of my life.”

Were you familiar with the play before you went up for the Mamma Mia! movie?
“Not at all. When I heard about the audition I thought, damn, I’m not Greek. I thought it was about this Greek family. Then I found out it wasn’t and went to see the stage show in Vegas. The enthusiasm went up tenfold. I was like, ‘I need to get this part, this is mine, this is me. This is what I can do and I can sing.’ Now, I can die happy.”

Was the dancing difficult?
“The dancing wasn’t really hard at all. I did have trouble with one of the songs, ‘I Have a Dream,’ during the pre-records. It’s a tough song for anybody to sing; it’s slow and the key is a bit low.”

Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgård play the guys who might be your father. Were they nice to you?
“They’re the sweetest men I could ever have the pleasure of working with. They’re all so different, but we got along so well. We joked around and were on all of these amazing island locations…. I’d date every one of them! I mean, I would have, but now that I know them and know that they’re all married or engaged…”

And Meryl Streep plays your mother. There’s a rumour going around that she’s our greatest living actress. How was she to work with?
“Awful! No, she’s one of the most beautiful human beings someone could meet, in all aspects. If I’m intimidated by her, it’s my problem, she doesn’t really put that energy out there. Someone like me, you just have to forget all she’s accomplished and put yourself on the same level. She treated me like a peer, which was pretty awesome. I was only 21 when I was working with her.”

Were you familiar with ABBA before this movie came along?
“My mother was very much of a hippie, so she didn’t partake in the whole ABBA phenomenon. As a result, I knew nothing about their music. But I’ll tell you, I own every single song now! And I definitely listen to them; it makes me happy. And it’s actually pretty complex music, their chords and their rhythms and everything. Actually, I don’t really want people to know that I’m listening to ABBA; it’s kind of embarrassing because I’m in the movie.”

Oh, you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. Although you should do something about your Internet Movie Database page; all the quotes from you are about jeans.
“And you can’t get ’em to do anything about it! I mean, those were taken totally out of context. I was at my first showbiz party, after the Daytime Emmy Awards, and this woman from TV Guide kept asking me about my fashion sense. I was a young Pennsylvania girl, and a little drunk, and she was like, ‘Let me just ask you 10,000 questions about jeans so you can look really stupid for the rest of your career.’ Basically, that’s what happened. Oh, it’s just so embarrassing. What a flake you must have thought I was!”

Not at all. We figured it was something like that. Happens all the time.
“Maybe I can just own it. Maybe I’ll do a huge jeans campaign! Good way to make money, too. [laughs] No. No fashion lines in my future.”  

Bob Strauss is an L.A.-based writer.


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