Despite tackling one of the most daunting roles of her career, Amanda Seyfried is all smiles. It’s the first sunny day in LA in a while, and she willingly moves from the indoor bar of West Hollywood’s Sunset Marquis Hotel to bask in the warmth of the poolside. She talks so fondly of her love for the sunlight, you’d never guess she spent the past year navigating the bleak darkness of an opioid-afflicted Philadelphia neighborhood in Peacock’s Long Bright River. Seyfried is maverick cop, Mickey Fitzpatrick, and as she investigates several murders and the disappearance of her estranged sister, Mickey must face the opioid crisis and its many tragedies head-on.

: I’m in awe that I hadn’t heard about the book before, because I’m usually up to date on whatever is on the bestseller list. I’m an Audible listener, and I’m obsessed with that app. Because I’m always doing something, I just eat up books on that app, so I’m surprised I have never heard of it before. But someone I respect greatly — who was a producer on The Dropout — texted me and said, “I just sent your agent a pilot, a bunch of scripts for a show that we’re adapting from a bestseller book. I would love for you to look at it.” And I was like, “Well, if she likes it, then it must be good.”

It was right at the tail end of the strike, so I got used to not working, which was nice. Then I was like, “Oh, this is just the kind of role that is incredibly rich and has a lot of opportunities to teach me some things, and in a world that I didn’t know about, but in a city that I grew up very close to.” So many elements made it seem like it was the obvious next job.

: I’m good about clocking in for work and clocking out. The subject matter is a survival mechanism. In terms of work, I take my relationships home with me, for sure. I’m always on group text with my producers and castmates or whatever. That’s the fun part, the human connection. We’re all artists creating this thing that we’re passionate about. And when we visit dark places like this genre, it’s so much easier to come to work when the environment is fun. 

Sometimes you can’t help but take some of it home, though. I didn’t have anywhere to go every night. I just went back to my apartment alone, and my kids were in Upstate New York, so it was tricky. But I also think there’s just a mechanism that we create over the years of, we know what it feels like when this stuff really infiltrates, and you start feeding off the drama of the content and the context and situations you’re shooting as an actor. And so, as you get older, you just know how to filter it out quickly.

: Some of it was luck that nothing happened overnight for me. When something goes from 0 to 60, I can’t imagine you’re not completely knocked off your balance because people are feeding off you. The attention must become something like a responsibility. There’s the impostor syndrome aspect of it. There’s also the lack of development. If you’re much younger, there aren’t enough tools for someone to thrive or even survive with that kind of attention, and I think it’s only gotten worse because of social media. I was never in that position. I’ve seen it happen many times. Some people survive, have rough patches, or have the right people around them, and it works. But I just can’t imagine it’s easy for anyone to be that recognizable and needed. 

It’s easy when you have power, money and fame, because people come to you and you’ll be surrounded by some nefarious f*ckers, and they will take advantage. I think that’s how a lot of that happens, and I didn’t have to deal with that. Was I partying in my 20s? Hell yeah, I was.

Amanda Seyfried on the effect of fame on young people.

: It’s important, as hard as it is, to really have some outlet where you can easily find grace. Because the truth is that it’s easy to be entitled. I think a lot of people get very entitled very quickly because people are just giving you everything because you have power. I get that. It’s like a mathematical equation, but it’s also like there’s a push and pull, there’s a give-and-take, everything costs something. I believe there’s a time and place where you’ll need to perform outside your performance zone, like taking pictures. You should say hello, be kind and gracious. But when all that fame comes on too fast, I can only imagine it’s too hard to keep your mind. Again, I’m very lucky. I was in Mean Girls, but I wasn’t being harassed like Lindsay [Lohan] was. Lindsay had a whole other experience; I can only have compassion for that.

But with that said, I think there are more tools now and more compassion. It’s easy when you have power, money and fame because people come to you and you’ll be surrounded by some nefarious f*ckers, and they will take advantage. I think that’s how a lot of that happens, and I didn’t have to deal with that. Was I partying in my 20s? Hell yeah, I was. Did I know what a club was? You should have seen me in London. You know what I mean? 

I was never into drugs because my obsessive-compulsive disorder is pretty severe, I’m not medicated, and I don’t trust drugs. But I do love alcohol. So, it’s like, I would just do that when everybody else was doing something else. And I for sure could have gotten into trouble. I never drove drunk, but I might have. It’s just like we’re all so close. This ties into Long Bright River, too, because when you watch a show like that, it’s very grounded, even though there’s the thriller aspect with the murders. But the foundation of it is that we are all more similar than we think, and the judgment comes from fear more than anything else. It’s like fear of the other. And it’s funny because we are so much closer to becoming the other. One or two mistakes or choices made back in the day, and you can end up somewhere else. Let’s be honest about that.

None of us are perfect, and a lot of us come from generational trauma, and that’s very hard to overcome, unless you’re doing the work, so it’s like, who has the right to judge anybody? 

: She comes from a place where she doesn’t feel safe in the world, so of course she’s going to behave the way that she does. And on top of that, it’s going to manifest in ways that aren’t helpful. She hasn’t really done the work to heal, and she doesn’t trust people, so that’s going to naturally harm her interpersonal relationships, so she just needs a lot of work. But I also think of the scene at the end where Mickey and her sister are on the dock together. Her sister tells Mickey she doesn’t need her help. Despite getting clean and having another child, she doesn’t want Mickey to feel like she owes her. Mickey is the last person to get the joke or the message, and that’s another thing about the book and the series that I liked: it doesn’t have to be happy, but you can see that people are thriving. Mickey is not a marionette or puppeteer to anybody, and she thinks she is. She even seems more even-keeled than she is. 

SEYFRIED: No, I had nothing to do with it. It was Nikki Toscano [the showrunner]. In the book, Mickey was obsessed with something else, and they made it — for the sake of the show — be an English horn and orchestral music. They had me learn the English horn, which is not an instrument that many people know, but because I played the clarinet as a teen, I picked it up very quickly. 

DEADLINE: You had another major musical experience that went viral — your dulcimer performance of Joni Mitchell’s song “California” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Cameron Crowe is making the biopic of her starring Meryl Streep. Was that your bid to play the younger Joni?

SEYFRIED: Can you believe that? I’ve never gone viral before. That was my one moment. There’s a history in the Joni Mitchell of it all. I learned the entire Blue album over the course of a year and a half during the pandemic. I had a teacher who taught me the dulcimer, four songs on the dulcimer, three songs on the piano and the guitar. I knew Joni Mitchell, but I wasn’t that close to her music until this project came about. I can’t give that many details though, because it was put to bed. She’s an icon though and part of me feels like everything worked out the way it was meant to be. But her manager [Elliot Roberts] passed away and so the project just went away. And Cameron’s her close friend, so he’s been working on a separate project for someone of Meryl’s age, and I didn’t know about Meryl until the dulcimer thing. The producer on Fallon had asked if I knew how to play musical instruments, and I mentioned I had learned the dulcimer and only knew Joni Mitchell songs, so that’s how that happened. 

I decided to play “California” because of the California wildfires. Joshua Jackson was on the show, too, and unbeknownst to me, he lost his house and talked about it on Fallon. So, I went on first and did that, and then he came out and talked about losing his house. It touched so many people in the studio. I only wanted to do one verse, as I was afraid I couldn’t do it because I don’t do live singing. I was terrified, but it went so well, and I just felt like I had a great time doing it. I got through it. On the backside of that though, people were calling Cameron, and he was saying he couldn’t stop the calls coming in. Then people called me and my agent. And it was great attention and affirmation of my love for music, and that’s what that is. But it wasn’t an audition, and everyone’s like, “Oh, she should play Joni. I won’t watch the movie if she doesn’t play Joni.” All of that is great, but there’s no room for me in that movie, and I don’t know if that’s what I want to do. Because there’s so much f*cking pressure to do that.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.