Lemonada

Lemonada

This is Talk Easy. I'm Stan Forgo, so welcome to the show.

Today, my conversation with actor Amanda Seifred.

Dating back to Mean Girls in 2004, Cypren has always felt like a performer on the verge.

In profiles, her trajectory is often paved with adjectives like ascendant and emerging,

a dynamic talent on the precipice of movie stardom.

But these descriptions are merely the stuff of glossy magazines.

And outside, its pages, is a singular career that's been building role by role for two

decades. Mama Mia, Dear John, Les Miserables, Big Love, her Emmy winning portrayal as Theranos founder

turned federal prison inmate, Elizabeth Holmes, and the dropout. She can play comedy,

she can play tragedy, she can do slapstick, she can do straight lace. And her latest two

projects, she's mostly doing the latter, though. Those include the new Peacock series, Long, Bright

River, where she plays a police officer in Philadelphia in a neighborhood ravaged by the opioid epidemic.

She's also the lead of the new thriller Seven Bales, which opened in theaters earlier this month.

There, she plays a theater director battling some repressed trauma as she prepares to mount an opera.

We sat down back around the release of Mank, in which she played legendary

silent film star Marian Davies. She received an Oscar nomination for that performance,

and it's one that, in the years since we spoke, I've returned to quite a bit. Sometimes a role

meets an actor exactly at the right time.

There's some kind of cosmic harmony to it,

resulting in a dialogue that Seifred, I think, needed to have in that moment in her life.

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