Amanda Seyfried has the eyes of a movie star. She got her start on television, doing a couple of years on the vintage soap As the World Turns before popping up throughout the run of Veronica Mars as the title character’s murdered bestie Lilly Kane, and never turned her back on the medium: Multiple seasons as a regular on Big Love; multiple episodes on the revival of Twin Peaks; and an Emmy, even, for playing Elizabeth Holmes on the acclaimed miniseries The Dropout. And she’s got another miniseries locked and loaded as the murder mystery Long Bright River just debuted on Peacock. Seyfried’s TV shows do typically make good use of her wide-eyed, blonde-goth spookiness, but that quality also seems tailor-made for bigger screens – even as her movie career hasn’t quite catapulted her to superstardom.
In the new movie Seven Veils, Seyfried plays Jeanine, a theatre director who has taken a challenging assignment, mounting a version of the opera Salome originally conceived by her mentor (and, from the sound of it, former lover). As Jeanine stares at the stage action unfolding in front of her in consternation – she’s not an experienced opera director, the higher-ups keep balking at her suggestions for how to tweak the material to accommodate her own sensibility, and opera performers are often exasperating – Seyfried looks older. That’s not a dig. She is older, two full decades removed from her wide-eyed movie debut in Mean Girls, where she took a dumb-blonde stereotype to sublime, and weirdly lovable, heights. Around 18 when the movie was shot, Seyfried was far closer to real teen-hood than costar Rachel McAdams, which only increased the risk that she could fall into the perma-youth zone that so many younger performers are forced to occupy for a decade or more. Indeed, both Veronica Mars and Big Love positioned her as a form of kid: The ghostly vision of a teenager not allowed to grow older, and a daughter in a polygamous family.
She was still playing a high-schooler five years after Mean Girls, with her convincingly innocent turn in Jennifer’s Body, and her other leading roles around this time play up the sun-dappled romance (Dear John; Letters to Juliet) or her surprise status as a musical ingenue (Mamma Mia!; Les Misérables). Real America’s Sweetheart stuff, though around the same time she was also working with her Seven Veils director Atom Egoyan (Canada’s Sweetheart, if you will) on Chloe, a movie about sexual obsession.
Much of Seyfried’s adult career has swung back and forth like that; she has a clear soft spot for treacle like Love the Coopers or The Big Wedding, while playing more complicated characters for far less sentimental filmmakers like Noah Baumbach (While We’re Young) and Paul Schrader (First Reformed). She synthesized these dual instincts for the old-fashioned and the provocative with her Oscar-nominated turn in Mank as Marion Davies, the movie-star lover of William Randolph Hearst, whose story screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz turns into Citizen Kane.
Between the Oscar nom and her Dropout Emmy, it seems like Seyfried should have experienced a next-level career surge. But in terms of embracing her movie-star moment, well, she seemed to mainly keep doing whatever she wants, even if that meant, say, starring in two oddly similar horror movies (You Should Have Left and Things Heard & Seen). As she approaches 40, Seyfried still makes the occasional movie-star play – like her recent odd but endearing all-but-audition for a Joni Mitchell biopic on The Tonight Show – but she’s not shy about aging into a different type of role than the ones that made her famous. Seven Veils is her latest project that turns on a serious, traumatized woman attempting to get through the day without screaming in frustration.
Her reunion with Egoyan is welcome, maybe especially for the filmmaker, who has spent some time in the wilderness since Chloe. The film is built around an actual version of Salome that Egoyan has directed repeatedly over the years, most recently in 2023; the film shoot was threaded into the real-life production, with some of its singers cast in the film as well. It’s one more mirror on a long hall of them: The in-movie Salome is a revival of a director’s vision that was, in turn, inspired by Jeanine’s childhood traumas – abuses are strongly hinted at but never shown – which makes it all the more frustrating when the departed director’s widow bristles at Jeanine making changes. The material belongs, in part, to her, but between the venerated genius she’s supposed to be honoring (at behest of the wife he cheated on, no less!) and the lineage of the text (an opera by Richard Strauss, inspired by an Oscar Wilde play, inspired by the Biblical story), she’s in danger of getting squeezed out. Filmmakers often employ movie-director characters as avatars of control, however imperfect; Egoyan, meanwhile, uses shots of Seyfried looking on or in reflections, frustrated or aghast, to emphasize a director’s limits. You can attempt to assert or impose yourself like a visionary, the movie seems to say, but even your own personal history can wind up escaping your grasp, leaving you a bewildered bystander (especially if you’re a woman who may have been set up to fail from the start).
Some of the film’s behind-the-scenes machinations are a little stilted and stagy themselves; there’s a remove to Seven Veils that does make it feel like one more layer of production, rather than a fully emotional experience. But Seyfried is remarkable throughout; those big eyes convey so much hurt, resilience, irritation, and insecurity. It’s an interesting juxtaposition seeing her in a theatrical context, because while she’s worked on multiple Broadway adaptations and might well do fine on stage, there’s something about her face that’s just perfect for a close-up – or, really, just a medium shot; she’s plenty expressive with a little more distance, too. Though she’s worked well in plenty of ensembles, there’s something about Seyfried that resists traditional chemistry, romantic or otherwise.
That distance may be why Seyfried hasn’t really connected as a next-level movie star. She can certainly play lovable sincerity; that’s part of what makes her so enticing to Ethan Hawke’s anguished character in First Reformed. But it’s the wells of sadness and darkness behind that sunny-blonde image that makes her such a compelling, even haunting presence. She embodies movie-star glamour while frequently looking as if glamour doesn’t quite sit right with her; just watch her on some of her past talk show appearances, where she often comes across as somewhere between bemused and wryly detached. Maybe that’s the countenance of someone who is simply just as home with dark procedural TV shows as the idea of movie stardom. But Seven Veils serves as a reminder that Seyfried is very much a movie star; just not in the way she may have looked at first.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.