🎧 Vision, Trust & Risk: How Amanda Seyfried & Mona Fastvold Truly Connected

The ‘The Testament of Ann Lee’ collaborators are bound together: ‘It’s so hard to find really good challenges these days with really good directors. Maybe I’ll quit’

RISK TAKERS “I just want to portray people with incredible complexity and truth,” Amanda Seyfried, left, with The Testament of Ann Lee director Mona Fastvold, tells me. “People who are so unlike me.” (The Ankler illustration; Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Searchlight Pictures)

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“It’s a really intimate experience to direct someone,” says Mona Fastvold, the director and co-writer of The Testament of Ann Lee. “Especially if you actually crack the code and you find that path to one another. And I did feel like we had that.”

What cracked the code between Fastvold, an Oscar nominee last year for co-writing The Brutalist with her real-life partner Brady Corbet, and actress Amanda Seyfried was not their intense collaboration on The Testament of Ann Lee. Instead, it was the project that introduced them to each other — the Norwegian-born Fastvold directed an episode of Seyfried’s Peacock limited series Long Bright River. At the time, when Fastvold, 44, mentioned that she was working on a musical inspired by the life of Shaker founder Ann Lee, Seyfried said she wanted to read it — but Fastvold knew it wouldn’t just be as simple as sending a script over and asking a star to come on board.

“I felt like I was anti-selling her,” Fastvold continues, with Seyfried nodding alongside her during our Zoom conversation, which you can watch on today’s Prestige Junkie episode. “It was more like, ‘This is my obsession. This is the wild thing that I want to dedicate years of my life to. I think it would be amazing if you would do that with me, but it also really has to be something that you have an appetite for.’ You can’t really sell someone on something like this.”

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🎧 It Took a Family Environment to Create ‘The Testament of Ann Lee’

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Seyfried, 40, who proved her musical bona fides in the Mamma Mia! movies and earned an Oscar nomination for 2020’s Mank, was ready for an even bigger challenge, and Ann Lee certainly provided it. The film focuses on the life of Lee, who immigrated to America from England in 1774 and grew her religious sect — which valued egalitarian ideals and equality between men and women, much to the consternation of other Christians — amid much pushback and violence. As Seyfried tells me on today’s episode, she was looking for “a director with a very clear-as-day vision and need for the story. Because you seem not to worry then — it was exactly what I wanted because I didn’t have to question too much. I just had to get to work.”

In our podcast conversation, Seyfried and Fastvold tell me about the many challenges they navigated together to bring The Testament of Ann Lee (out now from Searchlight) to life, from Covid delays — “We couldn’t even conceive of the idea of having 200 dancers moving and dancing and breathing in front of each other,” as Fastvold says — to Seyfried mastering an accent that matched Lee’s origins in Manchester, England.

Hear it all on today’s special Saturday edition of the Prestige Junkie podcast as we ring in the new year. And for even more from me, don’t miss the special all-star edition of the Prestige Junkie After Party podcast that dropped yesterday, with many of my favorite guests from the past year reflecting on the best thing that happened in Hollywood in 2025. There will be a second installment coming next week, as we all look ahead to this year, plus more After Party perks even sooner: Tomorrow night, subscribers can catch me and Christopher Rosen live after the Critics Choice Awards as we break down the first televised awards show of the season.

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