Amanda Seyfried makes sweetness feel unreliable, and can be frightening simply by going quiet. We rate her for the physical precision of her acting, which gives us reasons to watch even when the films are uneven.
Fi1m perspective
Nina Winchester becomes frightening when Amanda Seyfried goes quiet. In The Housemaid (2025), she passes from charm to viciousness to tears within a scene, then becomes sweet again. We laughed at the shamelessness of Nina wrecking a freshly cleaned room and blaming the housemaid, because Seyfried plays the spite without apology. She understands how far she can push this woman’s behaviour before the threat disappears into comedy. The quieter moments keep the joke from making her harmless.
The early parts encouraged a narrower view of her than the work now justifies. Her breakthrough as Karen Smith in Mean Girls (2004) established the comic side, while musicals including Les Misérables (2012) gave her singing more space. Mank (2020), in which she plays Marion Davies, and The Dropout (2022), as Elizabeth Holmes, brought the later dramatic work into clearer view. For Holmes she lowers her voice; that attention to how a character speaks matters again in Ann Lee.
The Testament of Ann Lee (2025) changed our mind about what she could carry. Under Mona Fastvold’s direction, her Ann Lee preaches with the impatience of someone who needs an answer now, while fatigue and pain remain visible in the effort of speaking. The singing is plain and unshowy, and the movements look untaught. Even the visions seem to reach her body before she can make sense of them. We had mostly seen her in lighter work, and the conviction of this performance made us reconsider how much we had noticed: there is little serenity here, and no attempt to make the effort look easy.
Neither of these 2025 films is as consistent as she is. Paul Feig lets The Housemaid drift for too long before its excesses become fun, and Fastvold’s narrator keeps explaining what the bodies and voices have already made clear. Seyfried’s abrupt changes of mood suit Nina, but this is broad acting, pitched to a film that eventually has the nerve to match it. Choose The Testament of Ann Lee for Seyfried, and be prepared to wait through the explanations between hymns.
Biography
Amanda Seyfried is an American actress. She began acting at the age of 15 with recurring roles as Lucy Montgomery in the CBS soap opera As the World Turns (1999–2001) and Joni Stafford in the ABC soap opera All My Children (2003).
Seyfried came to prominence with her feature film debut in Mean Girls (2004) and roles in Veronica Mars (2004–2006) and Big Love (2006–2011). She has starred in Mamma Mia! (2008) and its 2018 sequel, Jennifer's Body (2009), Les Misérables (2012), and The Dropout (2022). She received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Mank (2020) and won a Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy for The Dropout.
