Plenty of people have sobbed along to Taylor Swift songs while going through tough times, but Amanda Seyfried says she used Taylor’s music to block out what she calls the “hard s***” she went through while filming her new Peacock series, Long Bright River.
Seyfried plays a Philadelphia cop looking for her drug-addicted sister, who goes missing right around the time a serial killer starts targeting sex workers like her. The series deals with serious topics like the opioid crisis, homelessness, alcoholism, sexual abuse and corruption, which is why Amanda tells Variety she needed to decompress while commuting from the set each day. That’s where Taylor came in.
“My assistant and I would drive to work together and drive home together,” Seyfried says. “I think we kind of laughed a lot and gossiped a lot to and from work. So when the hard s*** happened, when I was playing all that emotional stuff, we just wouldn’t take it back in the car with us, subconsciously … we would listen to Taylor Swift really loud some days.”
Their preferred albums, according to Seyfried, were Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department.
Aside from Seyfried being a fan of Taylor’s, they have something else in common: Years ago Taylor was rumored to be playing Joni Mitchell in a biopic — before Mitchell nixed it. But after Seyfried performed Mitchell’s classic “California” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, fans have been clamoring for her to be cast as the legendary singer/songwriter in another Joni biopic from Cameron Crowe.
But Seyfried tells Variety that her performance wasn’t an audition, adding, “What I know about that project is that I’m very, very much aged-out of [playing] young Joni.”
Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
