Not many actors take an interest in the audience’s aftercare. When it comes to The Testament of Ann Lee, however, Amanda Seyfried is hands-on. “Did you watch it with someone you could talk to?” she asks, tilting her head sympathetically, then dipping her full-beam headlight eyes and giving a worried look when I admit that I saw it alone. “It’s nice to process it with somebody else.”
Her concern is understandable. Whatever feelings the film provokes, indifference will not be among them. Heady and rapturous, this is an all-round odd duck of a movie, the sort of go-for-broke phantasmagoria – an 18th-century musical biopic complete with feverish visions and levitating – that was once typical of Lars von Trier or Bruno Dumont. I confess I didn’t know exactly what to make of it, but I knew I had been through a singular experience. Its director, Mona Fastvold, seated beside Seyfried on a sofa in a London hotel room, looks delighted. “That’s my favourite sort of feeling,” she says.
Fastvold co-wrote the screenplay with her partner, Brady Corbet; their previous collaborations include last year’s Oscar-winning drama The Brutalist, which Corbet directed. (The couple also perform second-unit directing duties on one another’s movies.) Like that film, The Testament of Ann Lee is an immigrant story, though in this case a factual one. Seyfried gives a fearless, fever-pitch performance as Lee, the illiterate daughter of a Mancunian blacksmith, who in 1758 fell in with the Shaking Quakers, a religious group so-called because of the ecstatically shaking, trembling dances by which adherents responded to the infusion of God’s spirit. This was accompanied by soaring song and panted, rhythmic incantations; for the film, the British composer Daniel Blumberg, who won an Oscar for his score for The Brutalist, has rousingly adapted real Shaker hymns and spirituals.
In 1774, Lee and her fellow Shakers brought the religion to the US, built a village in Albany County, New York and preached their gospel of pacifism, equality of race and gender – and celibacy. Just as there is an austere beauty to the minimalist furniture that the Shakers made, such as ladder-back chairs with woven seats, so other elements of their lives were similarly pared back. “No one can love God while following the lust of the flesh,” Lee tells the disgruntled husband who fathered her four children, each of whom died in infancy. Her maternal agony escalated her religious devotion. “She decided to mother the world,” says Fastvold.
Aside from their vanilla-coloured hair, she and Seyfried are a study in contrasts today. The 40-year-old Pennsylvania-born actor, wearing a black dress with a white collar, is relaxed enough to stretch out her bare legs, plonking her black-shoed feet on the coffee table. As she talks, she gestures expansively. Fastvold, 44, barely moves: the Norwegian former dancer is perched on the edge of the sofa with her hands clasped in her lap. Her outfit is giving Star Trek: a boxy, stiff-shouldered charcoal felt top from which ribbed grey sleeves protrude. Together, actor and director resemble a high-spirited student and her reserved but loyal governess.
Both are singing from the same hymn sheet on how they hope viewers will approach the film. Introducing an American Film Institute screening last year, Seyfried told the audience: “Don’t be afraid to laugh: it’s absurd at moments and that’s what makes it special.” Fastvold agrees: “It’s operatic,” she says now. “Sometimes it’s very serious, and sometimes it doesn’t take itself seriously at all. You don’t want to make fun of anyone, but at the same time we can’t be full-on devout Shakers. It’s not like we’re trying to convert people.”
Fastvold stumbled on Ann Lee’s story while researching her previous film, the 19th-century lesbian drama The World to Come. The question hanging over the new picture, as with any period work, is: why tell this story today? “The more I found out, the more I felt I needed it now more than ever. We need to think about leadership in a different way. Leaders around the world are leading from a place of fear and intimidation, which is the opposite of Ann Lee. She led from a place of nurturing, mothering and equality.”
Fastvold met Seyfried when she was directing three episodes of the 2023 series The Crowded Room, in which the actor played an investigator grilling a suspected gunman (Tom Holland); they worked together again last year on the missing-person miniseries Long Bright River. In between, she gave Seyfried the Ann Lee script and offered her the lead. The story goes that her instant response was: “I know the way in.”
“You did say that,” says Fastvold, beaming proudly at her star. “But you also said, ‘Maybe you should cast someone British. Maybe you shouldn’t trust me.’ You had all these excuses. It was sort of gracious – like you wanted what was best for me and the film.”
What was the way in that Seyfried had identified? “I was holding on to Ann’s unadulterated passion and devotion,” she says. “I can understand how someone can be brought to their knees in that way, and how delicious and attractive that is to people who need something to believe in.”
Undercutting her confidence was something else: “Fear.” She hadn’t been this afraid of a role since playing Marion Davies, mistress of the media baron William Randolph Hearst, in David Fincher’s Citizen Kane-adjacent drama Mank. “Anything that feels far away from the contemporary-ness of the world scares me. Which makes it a thousand times more worthwhile.”
Mank went swimmingly: Seyfried’s joyful performance stole the movie and brought her an Oscar nomination. There may be any number of reasons why she hasn’t received one for playing Ann Lee. The movie itself is intoxicating once you submit, but not everyone will. An anonymous Academy voter recently told Variety that Seyfried was “astounding … I haven’t seen a better performance this year”, but admitted they “didn’t really like the movie”.
Perhaps her outspokenness has also counted against her this time. Last year, she distinguished herself spectacularly by refusing to row back on her description of the murdered far-right activist Charlie Kirk as “hateful” in an Instagram comment. She told Who What Wear: “I’m not fucking apologising for that.” In her own statement, she addressed the importance of nuance: “I can get angry about misogyny and racist rhetoric and ALSO very much agree that Charlie Kirk’s murder was absolutely disturbing and deplorable in every way imaginable.”
Shortly after that controversy, her name seemed to stop appearing among the five performers predicted to receive a best actress Oscar nomination this year. Could it be that the Academy feared another social media-related uproar in that category after last year’s scandal over reactionary tweets by Karla Sofía Gascón, star of Emilia Pérez? Seyfried needn’t care. “I’ve gotten this far without an Oscar,” she told the New Yorker this month. “Why would I need one now?” She is, as she has said, “sitting pretty” after the success of her loopy thriller The Housemaid, in which she co-stars with Sydney Sweeney. With that and The Testament of Ann Lee, she has multiplex and arthouse all sewn up.
As a trained singer, she has starred in musicals before, but The Testament of Ann Lee was infinitely more demanding than Mamma Mia! or Les Misérables. “It’s so technical: the choreography, the live singing, the Manchester accent. I was spinning so many plates.” Long before filming began, her preparation was already under way. “While I was on other jobs, I’d work on my Mancunian accent in my trailer by watching videos of Maxine Peake.” Celia Rowlson-Hall’s choreography also put mighty demands on her. “There was a lot of repetitive movement, using my body in a way that I’ve never done before. It becomes this full-bodied expression of your devotion. I was this vessel. It was exciting and scary and fucking great!” To decompress after a day of rhythmic pounding and lurching and swaying in 18th-century costume, she would “listen to something ridiculously separate like Backstreet Boys”.
Much of the film was shot in Hungary, on a bustling set: Fastvold encouraged her cast and crew to bring their children along, too. Once most of the families had departed, the two women became roomies for the final stretch. “I made her move into my apartment,” Seyfried says. “It was very cosy.”
“I wanted to!” Fastvold protests. “The sweet thing was that we had both been working and taking care of our children, but once I moved in with Amanda …” She turns to address her directly: “You were doing little things to take care of me. I’d done my laundry, then gone out location scouting on a Sunday, and when I came home my socks had been balled up and placed in my closet. I nearly cried. Brady’s very nurturing and he makes the best sandwich ever. But at the same time, there was something about living with this very maternal person that was amazing.” It has set a high bar for the future. “Now I’ll ask all my leading ladies, ‘How do you feel about folding laundry?’”
The nourishment flowed both ways. “I would wake up and you’d have the French press, the beautiful music playing, a candle going,” Seyfried recalls. “We went to the spa and you brought your little shot list. Mona’s so funny. She gets ready for work and she has her cute handkerchief. I was, like, ‘My God, she’s an angel from heaven!’” Not the sort of stories you hear from a Michael Bay set.
Fastvold and Corbet have an 11-year-old daughter, Ada, while Seyfried and her husband, Thomas Sadoski, have a son and daughter, both under 10. Corbet made a point of singling out a tearful Ada in the audience at the Golden Globes last year when he won the best director prize. Fastvold says: “Early on, when my daughter was young, she would say, ‘Why do you have to go off and make a film and be away from me? Why can’t you be a teacher?’ My instinct was to say, ‘I have to go out and make money for us.’ Then I realised that’s not the right thing to say. What I should say is, ‘I’m going to leave you because I really want to do this job. I’m so excited to do it. And I am going to miss you, but I’m going to have such a fun time.’ And she accepted it in a totally different way. She didn’t feel that I was being forced to leave her.”
Seyfried likes to let her children see her vulnerability. “The other day, I told my daughter, ‘I’m sad because right now I’m tired and I’m travelling away from you, and I miss you.’ But she knows that what I’m doing right now is important for me. Of course, she also knows I’m going to pick stuff up for her. She’ll get stationery, she’ll get plushies …”
Both women have been extravagant in their praise for one another while promoting The Testament of Ann Lee, but two adjectives have leapt out: Fastvold has admiringly labelled her star “a little mad”, while Seyfried has plumped for “brave”. Would they care to elaborate? Fastvold clarifies her remark: “Mad in a playful way. The best of us are, I think. What I mean is, Amanda’s very free. She needs to not have any filter, I think, to access all the places she needs to go in her work.”
As for the bravery part: “You don’t care about the rules,” Seyfried tells Fastvold. “You don’t care if something is hard to do. You absolutely stay on your own path. Look, you directed a fucking Shaker musical set in the 1770s about a woman no one’s ever heard of. And it premiered at Venice!”
It sounds almost Ann Lee-like. Does that mean there is an autobiographical dimension to the film? Fastvold smiles bashfully. “Isn’t there always?” she says.
• The Testament of Ann Lee is in UK cinemas from 20 February.
