Amanda Seyfried speaks about Ann Lee and her legacy with a mixture of fascination and disbelief. Lee — a visionary religious chief usually credited as America’s first feminist — isn’t just the lady Seyfried embodies within the new movie The Testomony of Ann Lee, but in addition the power behind a motion constructed on equality and communal care lengthy earlier than its time.
“I don’t perceive how the world could possibly be so turned on its head proper now,” Seyfried tells Yahoo, “when this lady was making a secure house for individuals again within the 18th century.”
That depth carries into Seyfried’s work within the movie, which is grounded in bodily depth, emotional excavation and a sort of religious give up she’s by no means tried onscreen earlier than. Although Seyfried isn’t any stranger to musicals (Mamma Mia!, Les Misérables), The Testomony of Ann Lee pushed her past what she’s used to. To play Lee, the founding father of the Shakers, the position calls for every thing of her: her voice, her physique, her breath, her perception system and finally her capability to carry grief with out being swallowed by it.
Changing into Ann Lee
For Seyfried, the primary transformation started together with her voice. She has sung in among the most-watched musical movies of the previous 20 years, but Lee required a wholly new relationship to sound. Les Misérables was, as she places it, “a marathon,” constructed across the endurance of singing stay day after day. Mamma Mia! was its reverse — studio periods first, efficiency later. Lee was totally different.
“Ann Lee’s simply goes a lot deeper,” she says. “She’s singing as a result of she wants to sing, not as a result of she needs to. It brings her nearer to God, and it offers her a function, 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 by no means had the chance to only scream by a tune like I did in studio with ‘Lovely Treasures,’” she says, referring to certainly one of greater than a dozen conventional Shaker hymns reimagined within 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 the way you really feel once you do it.”
Seyfried screams her means by one highly effective efficiency in her new movie. (Searchlight Footage)
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-Corridor, permitting motion to emerge from impulse slightly than management. “It’s so bodily,” she says, “that it sort of takes you to a unique sort of stage of with the ability to categorical your self.”
For Seyfried, embodying Lee meant trusting intuition over management. “You simply learn to use your physique in another way and make totally different vocalizations,” she says. “And it’s so releasing.”
The onscreen outcome feels uncooked and unguarded. Seyfried’s physique trembles, her breath fractures, her voice cracks — not for impact, however as a result of the efficiency calls for it. It’s a part of what makes her portrayal of Lee really feel much less acted than inhabited.
Holding the grief
The bodily rigor of the position was matched by an equally intense emotional panorama, significantly within 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 need of grounding the story in that actuality — however she additionally knew she couldn’t absolutely inhabit it with out it taking a severe emotional toll.
“Actually, as somebody with youngsters, I needed to abandon that for myself with a purpose to shield myself,” she says. She and director Mona Fastvold agreed the early childbirth sequences wanted to be unsparing, not symbolic. “Crucial half was to get as graphic as attainable,” Seyfried explains, “so individuals may perceive a bit of bit extra about what childbirth is and the price of shedding your kids … which is what Ann Lee was relentlessly affected by.”
To get by these scenes, Seyfried says she needed to preserve some emotional distance slightly than mentally going by the loss every time. “I can’t try this over and over,” she says.
Fastvold, she provides, created a secure atmosphere that made that steadiness attainable. “She is like Ann Lee in that she’s so compassionate,” Seyfried says. “She understands how essential it’s to painting life in all its good and dangerous.” That philosophy permeates the movie, which by no means flattens Lee into a logo or martyr.
Regardless of its difficult early moments, The Testomony of Ann Lee is just not unrelentingly grim. Even amid its grief, there are flashes of heat, curiosity and humor — moments that humanize Lee and the group round her. Seyfried herself is fast to notice that the story permits room for mild and that audiences are allowed to snort.
“Hopefully, there’s some levity on the finish of it,” she says. “There’s completely some levity in her journey.” That steadiness — between struggling and sustenance — is a part of what makes the movie really feel alive slightly than punishing.
The actress labored with choreographer Celia Rowlson-Corridor for the movie’s musical numbers. (Searchlight Footage)
A utopia forward of its time
Lee’s worldview, as Seyfried describes it, was radically easy. “What she preached was group and compassion and kindness,” she says. Lee constructed one thing that resisted simple labels. “She created a — not a cult, not like a spiritual motion — however extra like a utopia.”
That utopian impulse was revolutionary for its time. “There was a whole equality between gender and race at a time when girls had been their husbands’ property,” Seyfried says. “It was completely unparalleled.” And but, Lee was largely forgotten. “It was unseen and unstated in American historical past — and she or he 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 modified that a lot,” she says. “We nonetheless wish to really feel secure on this brief life that now we have. We nonetheless wish to be heard, listened to and revered. We nonetheless need a seat on the desk.”
