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.”