Amanda Seyfried is back in a movie musical. It’s the best performance of her career.

Amanda Seyfried speaks about Ann Lee and her legacy with a mix of fascination and disbelief. Lee — a visionary spiritual leader often credited as America’s first feminist — is not just the woman Seyfried embodies in the new film The Testament of Ann Lee, but also the force behind a movement built on equality and communal care long before its time.

“I don’t understand how the world could be so turned on its head right now,” Seyfried tells Yahoo, “when this woman was creating a safe space for people back in the 18th century.”

That intensity carries into Seyfried’s work in the film, which is grounded in physical intensity, emotional excavation and a kind of spiritual surrender she’s never attempted onscreen before. Though Seyfried is no stranger to musicals (Mamma Mia!, Les Misérables), The Testament of Ann Lee pushed her beyond what she’s used to. To play Lee, the founder of the Shakers, the role demands everything of her: her voice, her body, her breath, her belief system and ultimately her capacity to hold grief without being swallowed by it.

Becoming Ann Lee

For Seyfried, the first transformation began with her voice. She has sung in some of the most-watched musical films of the past two decades, yet Lee required an entirely new relationship to sound. Les Misérables was, as she puts it, “a marathon,” built around the endurance of singing live day after day. Mamma Mia! was its opposite — studio sessions first, performance later. Lee was different.

“Ann Lee’s just goes so much deeper,” she says. “She’s singing because she needs to sing, not because she wants to. It brings her closer to God, and it gives her a purpose, and it’s how she worships.”

To access that urgency, Seyfried worked with improvisational singers Shelley Hirsch and Maggie Nicols, who encouraged her to abandon polish and lean into instinct. “I’ve never had the opportunity to just scream through a song like I did in studio with ‘Beautiful Treasures,’” she says, referring to one of more than a dozen traditional Shaker hymns reimagined in the film. “The vocalizing comes from such a primal place.” This wasn’t about sounding good; it was about feeling truthful. “It’s not about what you hear — it’s how you feel when you do it.”

That physical immediacy extends beyond her voice. Shaker worship was famously ecstatic — shaking, stomping, spiraling — a bodily expression of faith that gave the movement its name. To capture that, Seyfried worked closely with choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall, allowing movement to emerge from impulse rather than control. “It’s so physical,” she says, “that it kind of takes you to a different kind of level of being able to express yourself.”

For Seyfried, embodying Lee meant trusting instinct over control. “You just learn how to use your body differently and make different vocalizations,” she says. “And it’s so freeing.”

The onscreen result feels raw and unguarded. Seyfried’s body trembles, her breath fractures, her voice cracks — not for effect, but because the performance demands it. It’s part of what makes her portrayal of Lee feel less acted than inhabited.

Holding the grief

The physical rigor of the role was matched by an equally intense emotional landscape, particularly in the film’s opening stretch, which depicts Lee’s repeated pregnancies and devastating losses. (Lee gave birth to four children, and all of them died in infancy.) Seyfried understood the necessity of grounding the story in that reality — but she also knew she couldn’t fully inhabit it without it taking a serious emotional toll.

“Honestly, as someone with kids, I had to abandon that for myself in order to protect myself,” she says. She and director Mona Fastvold agreed the early childbirth sequences needed to be unsparing, not symbolic. “The most important part was to get as graphic as possible,” Seyfried explains, “so people could understand a little bit more about what childbirth is and the cost of losing your children … which is what Ann Lee was relentlessly suffering from.”

To get through those scenes, Seyfried says she had to maintain some emotional distance rather than mentally going through the loss each time. “I can’t do that over and over again,” she says.

Fastvold, she adds, created a safe environment that made that balance possible. “She is like Ann Lee in that she’s so compassionate,” Seyfried says. “She understands how important it is to portray life in all its good and bad.” That philosophy permeates the film, which never flattens Lee into a symbol or martyr.

Despite its challenging early moments, The Testament of Ann Lee is not unrelentingly grim. Even amid its grief, there are flashes of warmth, curiosity and humor — moments that humanize Lee and the community around her. Seyfried herself is quick to note that the story allows room for light and that audiences are allowed to laugh.

“Hopefully, there’s some levity at the end of it,” she says. “There’s totally some levity in her journey.” That balance — between suffering and sustenance — is part of what makes the film feel alive rather than punishing.

A utopia ahead of its time

Lee’s worldview, as Seyfried describes it, was radically simple. “What she preached was community and compassion and kindness,” she says. Lee built something that resisted easy labels. “She created a — not a cult, not like a religious movement — but more like a utopia.”

That utopian impulse was revolutionary for its time. “There was a complete equality between gender and race at a time when women were their husbands’ property,” Seyfried says. “It was absolutely unheard of.” And yet, Lee was largely forgotten. “It was unseen and unspoken in American history — and she did exist.”

As she reflects on the role, Seyfried returns to what feels most enduring about Lee’s legacy — not doctrine, but dignity.

“Humanity has not changed that much,” she says. “We still want to feel safe in this short life that we have. We still want to be heard, listened to and respected. We still want a seat at the table.”

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