The Times – Amanda Seyfried’s schedule isn’t very “Hollywood”. When, long after we’ve run over our allotted time, the 35-year-old actress apologises and says she’ll have to say goodbye in ten minutes, it’s not because she’s in the middle of filming or has a fitting or urgently needs to speak to her agent. No, the light is fading and she’s on feeding duty for her menagerie, on 27 acres in the Catskills in upstate New York.

“Six goats — some mornings there are just more goats, as you get into goats and people start reaching out to you saying, ‘Take these’ — two big horses, two mini-horses — they were a mistake, I love them, but they’re so weird — a donkey that I’m so in love with, a pony that we brought from next door who is going to die here — he’s very old, but he’s very nice — and a barn cat,” she reels off. Also resident on the farm are her husband of almost four years, the actor Thomas Sadoski, their three-year-old daughter and four-month-old son (the couple don’t publicly name their children, although Seyfried laughs at the fact that she’s on Zoom with me wearing a jumper with her son’s name on it), and Seyfried’s mother, who has lived with them since their daughter was a few days old. “She moved in after the baby was born and never moved out, and I don’t want her to,” Seyfried says. “My husband’s going to work on Sunday — he’s flying down to Georgia to do a movie for three months [Devotion, about the first black American fighter pilot, set in the Korean War] and I would be alone with two kids.” Her big blue Disney eyes widen further at the thought. “I know families do that all the time, but I’m such a momma’s girl and she has always come to my rescue.”

She bought the farm seven years ago, after a decade of living in Los Angeles and Manhattan’s West Village, where she still has an apartment. Thanks to the pandemic, though, and her son’s birth in September, the family has been ensconced at the farm since February — the longest stretch she has spent in one place for years. “I always had a lot of anxiety in my teens and twenties, but once I had kids the anticipatory dread would come from packing, leaving and going to Asia or Europe for work. Once I got there I enjoyed myself, but this year, not having to go anywhere, it’s the least uptight I’ve ever been.”

For the first half hour of our conversation she is chatty but, judging from all I’ve seen and read of her, uncharacteristically sombre. “Sorry, I keep going to the negative,” she apologises. “Why can’t I think of anything positive? What an asshole.” Asshole is a bit harsh and her negativity is not without good reason: six days earlier a violent mob marched on the Capitol in Washington, and the day after we speak Donald Trump will be impeached for a second time. “It’s frightening and unnerving right now,” she says.

In truth it’s refreshing to speak to an actress of her profile — star of the cult teen classic Mean Girls, campy musical box-office smash Mamma Mia! (and its even campier sequel, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again), Les Misérables, the HBO series Big Love and indie fare such as While We’re Young and First Reformed — who isn’t putting on a show for me. And who would seemingly rather talk about anything other than work. After several failed attempts, however, I manage to get her onto her latest film, Mank, in which she plays Marion Davies, the 1930s movie star and mistress of the publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst (played by Charles Dance), who managed her and launched her Hollywood career. The highly stylised production stars Gary Oldman as Herman J Mankiewicz, the alcoholic screenwriter of Citizen Kane (although he shared the credit, and the Oscar, with Orson Welles), whose central characters were based on Hearst and Davies, the latter’s real life and career becoming overshadowed by the characterisation of her cruel, talentless alter ego in the seminal film.

Correcting that misconception was part of the draw for Seyfried. “The script was a version of Marion that I think really does her justice and that I think most people don’t know about,” she nods. “She was hilarious and the life of the party, but she was also smart, and she did love Hearst — it was a special relationship built on trust and honesty,” Seyfried says. She also comes across as a pragmatist, albeit one in exquisite gowns, marabou jackets and majorette hats.

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LA Times – How excited was Amanda Seyfried at the prospect of starring in a David Fincher film? “I would have played a piece of wood,” she says with a laugh. Luckily for all involved, the role as silver screen star Marion Davies for Fincher’s Netflix release “Mank” was nowhere near as stiff. In fact, Seyfried delivers a scene-stealing performance, one that neither of the two initially took for granted would happen for the story of “Citizen Kane” screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and his friendship with the actress and companion to media mogul William Randolph Hearst.

[…] Her character was a rare historical figure for Seyfried to portray. Over two decades, Davies starred in over 40 features spanning both the silent and talkie eras. Many of those films were financed by Hearst (portrayed by Charles Dance). To the general public, she was his mistress but, in private, their relationship was much more complicated.

[…] “I think Marion’s so smart and she knows how to play certain situations in order to get the most out of it,” Seyfried says. “She’s not someone who wants to create drama at all. She just wants everybody to enjoy themselves. But you have to be kind of smart in certain ways to know how to manipulate and negotiate your way through these big conversations that these big industry men are having. She knows how to survive and make the best of it.”

Despite Davies’ catalog of motion pictures, researching how the actress behaved and sounded off screen was thorny. There were some audio recordings and an autobiography (Seyfried refers to it as “a bizarre read”), but it was films like 1936’s “Cain and Mabel” that gifted her with insight into Davies’ mannerisms. Seyfried notes, “Something that lived with me was just the way she listened and the way she would move her neck and her jaw. It was just very physical.”

As the daughter of a father who still collects 16- and 35-mm film prints, Seyfried grew up with an education in classic Hollywood pictures of Davies’ particular era. Knowing the tone and the feel of the time wasn’t the issue. Finding the subtle “Brooklynese” that Fincher wanted in her voice was the trickier part.

“I was like, ‘Can I do that? Is that how it’s going to be? Because I don’t know if I can,’ ” Seyfried says, noting the lack of reference material to her off-screen speaking voice. “She had a stutter in real life. We didn’t even go there in the film.”

NY Times – In Netflix’s new drama “Mank,” directed by David Fincher and due Friday on Netflix, Seyfried plays Marion Davies, the 1920s and ’30s screen star better known today as the mistress of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. It’s a relationship that would be fictionalized for Orson Welles’s roman à clef “Citizen Kane,” and “Mank” chronicles that process, as the screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) reminisces about the years he spent partying at Hearst’s San Simeon estate, a glittery Shangri-La where Davies became a confidante with whom he could share gossip and gin.

[…] When Marion’s not onscreen, you wish she was, but Seyfried is not used to being deemed the standout: When reading the rave reviews for “First Reformed” (2018), in which she played a pregnant widow beseeching Ethan Hawke’s conflicted pastor, Seyfried was happy just to get an honorable mention. She has found that most of the time when critics name her, it’s in a parenthetical telling you who played the daughter or the girlfriend. “Skating through like that has been my experience, mostly,” she said.

[…] Despite her fair share of hits, Seyfried was still shocked when she ran into Quentin Tarantino at the airport recently and he knew who she was. “Keep your expectations low,” she told me, “and you’ll be pleasantly surprised.” Last fall, when her agent relayed that Fincher had her in mind for “Mank,” Seyfried’s eyes filled with tears. “It’s really nice to be respected by somebody that you think is just a one-of-a-kind master of his domain,” she said.

[…] “We all knew that Amanda was luminescent, we all knew that she was effervescent, we all knew that she was funny,” he [Ficher] said. “We all knew that she understood how to parse or set up a joke, and we all knew that she could be moving. I think the thing that was ultimately surprising was the mercurial nature of how quickly she could scramble through those things, because it gives Marion this whole other dimension.”

[…] Safety is a priority for Seyfried, and she wants it to be a priority for Hollywood, too. She was reminded of this over the summer during a contentious vote to ratify the new Screen Actors Guild contract. “There was a lot of infighting, and it was really hard to know where I stood,” she said. Ultimately, Seyfried voted no, because she felt the contract didn’t do enough to protect actors who are shooting intimate scenes: “I just feel like really, this industry is not as safe as it wants to be.”

[…] No matter how her “Mank” performance fares this awards season, all the time she has spent on her farm this year has given Seyfried the ability to see these things much more clearly.

“This movie is definitely the best opportunity I’ve had in my career, and it is absolutely shifting my career for the better,” she said. “But without it, I was just as happy, because I’ve made space for myself to feel accomplished in my own world.”