Amanda Seyfried is back in a movie musical. It’s the best performance of her profession.

Amanda Seyfried is back in a movie musical. It’s the best performance of her profession.

Amanda Seyfried speaks about Ann Lee and her legacy with a combine of fascination and disbelief. Lee — a visionary non secular chief often credited as America’s first feminist — is not just the lady Seyfried embodies in the new movie The Testament of Ann Lee, however also the power behind a motion constructed on equality and communal care lengthy before its time.

“I don’t understand how the world could be so turned on its head right now,” Seyfried tells Yahoo, “when this woman was creating a safe space for people back in the 18th century.”

That depth carries into Seyfried’s work in the movie, which is grounded in bodily depth, emotional excavation and a type of non secular give up she’s never tried onscreen before. Though Seyfried is no stranger to musicals (Mamma Mia!, Les Misérables), The Testament of Ann Lee pushed her past what she’s used to. To play Lee, the founder of the Shakers, the position calls for the whole lot of her: her voice, her physique, her breath, her perception system and in the end her capability to carry grief without being swallowed by it.

Becoming Ann Lee

For Seyfried, the first transformation started with her voice. She has sung in some of the most-watched musical movies of the past 20 years, yet Lee required a wholly new relationship to sound. Les Misérables was, as she places it, “a marathon,” constructed round the endurance of singing live day after day. Mamma Mia! was its reverse — studio classes first, performance later. Lee was different.

“Ann Lee’s just goes so much deeper,” she says. “She’s singing because she needs to sing, not because she wants to. It brings her closer to God, and it gives her a purpose, and it’s how she worships.”

To entry that urgency, Seyfried labored with improvisational singers Shelley Hirsch and Maggie Nicols, who inspired her to desert polish and lean into intuition. “I’ve never had the opportunity to just scream through a song like I did in studio with ‘Beautiful Treasures,’” she says, referring to 1 of more than a dozen conventional Shaker hymns reimagined in the movie. “The vocalizing comes from such a primal place.” This wasn’t about sounding good; it was about feeling truthful. “It’s not about what you hear — it’s how you feel when you do it.”

Seyfried screams her method via one highly effective performance in her new movie. (Searchlight Pictures)

That bodily immediacy extends past her voice. Shaker worship was famously ecstatic — shaking, stomping, spiraling — a bodily expression of religion that gave the motion its identify. To seize that, Seyfried labored intently with choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall, permitting motion to emerge from impulse reasonably than management. “It’s so physical,” she says, “that it kind of takes you to a different kind of level of being able to express yourself.”

For Seyfried, embodying Lee meant trusting intuition over management. “You just learn how to use your body differently and make different vocalizations,” she says. “And it’s so freeing.”

The onscreen result feels uncooked and unguarded. Seyfried’s physique trembles, her breath fractures, her voice cracks — not for impact, however because the performance calls for it. It’s half of what makes her portrayal of Lee really feel less acted than inhabited.

Holding the grief

The bodily rigor of the position was matched by an equally intense emotional panorama, notably in the movie’s opening stretch, which depicts Lee’s repeated pregnancies and devastating losses. (Lee gave delivery to 4 kids, and all of them died in infancy.) Seyfried understood the necessity of grounding the story in that actuality — however she also knew she couldn’t totally inhabit it without it taking a critical emotional toll.

“Honestly, as someone with kids, I had to abandon that for myself in order to protect myself,” she says. She and director Mona Fastvold agreed the early childbirth sequences wanted to be unsparing, not symbolic. “The most important part was to get as graphic as possible,” Seyfried explains, “so people could understand a little bit more about what childbirth is and the cost of losing your children … which is what Ann Lee was relentlessly suffering from.”

To get via those scenes, Seyfried says she needed to keep some emotional distance, reasonably than mentally going via the loss each time. “I can’t do that over and over again,” she says.

Fastvold, she provides, created a secure surroundings that made that stability doable. “She is like Ann Lee in that she’s so compassionate,” Seyfried says. “She understands how important it is to portray life in all its good and bad.” That philosophy permeates the movie, which never flattens Lee into a image or martyr.

Despite its difficult early moments, The Testament of Ann Lee is not unrelentingly grim. Even amid its grief, there are flashes of heat, curiosity and humor — moments that humanize Lee and the community round her. Seyfried herself is fast to notice that the story permits room for light and that audiences are allowed to chortle.

“Hopefully, there’s some levity at the end of it,” she says. “There’s totally some levity in her journey.” That stability — between struggling and sustenance — is half of what makes the movie really feel alive reasonably than punishing.

The actress labored with choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall for the movie’s musical numbers. (Searchlight Pictures)

A utopia ahead of its time

Lee’s worldview, as Seyfried describes it, was radically simple. “What she preached was community and compassion and kindness,” she says. Lee constructed one thing that resisted simple labels. “She created a — not a cult, not like a religious movement — but more like a utopia.”

That utopian impulse was revolutionary for its time. “There was a complete equality between gender and race at a time when women were their husbands’ property,” Seyfried says. “It was absolutely unheard of.” And yet, Lee was largely forgotten. “It was unseen and unspoken in American history — and she did exist.”

As she displays on the position, Seyfried returns to what feels most enduring about Lee’s legacy — not doctrine, however dignity.

“Humanity has not changed that much,” she says. “We still want to feel safe in this short life that we have. We still want to be heard, listened to and respected. We still want a seat at the table.”

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