BABYLOVE
Actress. Animal activist. Crafter. Soon to be a mother. Amanda Seyfried on growing up.
Actress. Animal activist. Crafter. Soon to be a mother. Amanda Seyfried on growing up. By Zara Wong. Styled by Christine Centenera. Photographed by Emma Summerton.
“I BUY DIAMONDS FOR MYSELF: THE LAST THING I WANTED WAS FOR A MAN TO BUY ME ANOTHER DIAMOND”
Thirty. Underrated or overrated, it’s a milestone age that demarcates your self-seeking 20s from your 30s, when you’re meant to have everything, well, sorted. “Thirty was so strange for me,” once quipped C.S. Lewis. “I’ve really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.” “Wait, how old are you?” asks Amanda Seyfried, angling her head closer to me, scrutinising her iPhone screen via FaceTime from her home in Los Angeles. “We’re born in the same month!” she exclaims. “Are you having a difficult year? Everyone said to me that leading up to 30, when you’re 29, it’s going to be Saturn returns, it’s going to be intense. I feel like you have to go through the shit sometimes to get to the good part. Thirty has been my best year. You don’t have long to go.”
When we speak, she is newly engaged to actor Thomas Sadoski, having met him when they starred alongside each other in the Broadway play The Way We Get By, and pregnant. “I’ve never been excited by anything more in my life,” she says. “And ready.” Signing up to the play forced her to overcome long-held stage fright, and it was the same year she had a break-up with a longterm boyfriend. “I made the decision to do the play because it was about facing my fears. It brought such a wave of growth, because it was so scary,” she said of being 29. “I just learnt so much, and personally too, like with a break-up, it was a lot of adult stuff going on, and adult decision-making. I had to be really cut-and-dry with myself.”
The engagement happened on her farm in Stone Ridge, that kind of perfectly quaint American storybook name that can only exist in upstate New York. “It was a quiet moment. I’m not very romantic: I’m quite practical,” she says of her engagement. “But I love hearing engagement stories. Whenever a friend gets engaged I want to see the ring. I’m so excited to hear about something so dramatic and loved-up, but personally it would make me uncomfortable. I’m not even wearing a diamond.” With engagements also happening in the Vogue offices recently, our interview tangents into nuptials and wedding talk; how people react to the news, the pros and cons of eloping versus having an intimate ceremony or a full-blown wedding. “It’s nice to make a decision about something. It is like another adult thing that I feel like I’m doing and I am really confident doing. It’s nice to have an agreement.” She points out her own engagement ring on her finger, a thin stamped band that she had bought from a vintage jeweller in Portland, Oregon. It is far and away from some of the ice-cube-sized sparklers seen elsewhere in Hollywood. It is strictly not her first engagement ring – that was one she bought herself at the age of 16, the “cheapest one from Tiffany & Co!”, she tells me proudly. “I got my first big pay cheque, and it was a tiny diamond. I was like: ‘I can’t afford it, but I am going to do it because I deserve it!’” she recalls. “I’ve been buying diamonds for years for myself and the last thing I wanted was for a man to buy me another diamond.”
She’s not sure if a formal wedding is on the cards. “I don’t want to be the centre of attention. I get to go to premieres and get dressed up all the time. I went to the Met Gala last year in a wedding gown designed by Riccardo Tisci; I’ve played a bride a billion times.” To recap, she has been a bride in Les Misérables, Mamma Mia! and The Big Wedding, and has a penchant for wearing shades of white and cream on the red carpet – all the better to suit her rose-touched alabaster complexion. And as many newly engaged people have come to realise, wedding questions are sure to abound. “People are way more traditional than you think. It’s kind of shocking, because it feels like we’ve come such a long way, but then we are reversing. Whenever I see somebody my age asking me questions [about relationships and weddings] and coming from a traditional place, I just find it surprising,” she says, sipping on a spiced pumpkin latte from Starbucks. “People’s reactions to the news have been interesting. Everybody is so specific and different, and as much as it feels like there is room for everybody to be who they are, it proves to you that there isn’t as much room as you might think.”
Although she avoids reading about herself, the reactions to her non-diamond engagement ring had reached even her. “People are giving me flak about it,” she says, pulling a quizzical look. “I was surprised anyone was talking about it at all. It was a weird type of attention, but it’s not the worst thing. Nobody could care and then nobody would see my next movie! It’s really just the same thing as people thinking they know people who are in the public eye. They think they have you pinned,” she explains. And with a laugh, she pauses and reflects: “My life is a little more weird than the average nine-tofiver! But it’s interesting to see how people have come to expect something because I am somewhat famous-ish.”
And by famous-ish, she means that her break-out film role was in the critically and commercially successful Mean Girls over a decade ago, as well as the aforementioned blockbusters. She could have easily been typecast as the girlfriend, the sex bomb, the rom-com girl-next-door, but her choices in acting roles have been varied, including the TV series Big Love and Lovelace. Coming up, she will be starring in an as-yet-untitled Nash Edgerton project, the new Twin Peaks and The Last Word, with Shirley MacLaine. “I think she has the ability to work effortlessly in different genres,” says Edgerton about Seyfried. The two had been friends for years, and had always vowed to work together.
Seyfried has been working steadily since she started acting in 2001 on the television series As the World Turns. “When people are really hot right now you can’t maintain that without a lot of work and effort and talent. It’s been a while since I was on any kind of radar and it has been a while since I was new, or breakthrough, or whatever those stupid adjectives they use to describe people,” she evaluates. “It’s easy to feel kind of insecure, but at the same time I also realise that I would never take any movies back.”
With her f laxen blonde hair and swimming-pool eyes, it’s too simplistic a mental association to peg her as a sort of delicate, otherworldly beauty. She is the kind of girl who has been picked up by Miu Miu to front its latest campaign, and is considered a friend of the French fashion house Givenchy and its creative director Riccardo Tisci, fronting the Very Irresistible fragrance campaign.
Seyfried is a true “normal girl” with her refreshing frankness – not in the way that celebrities casually drop in remarks, contriving to suggest that they’re just like one of us. Possessing an easy sweetness, she approaches her interviews as a way to make
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