“There’s an extra layer of expression in musicals, obviously, because you’re singing and moving in a way that you aren’t when you’re just speaking to somebody,” the Golden Globe nominee says of her affinity for the genre. “And it enhances every experience as an actor and as the character that I’m portraying. It just kind of lifts everything off the ground a little bit in a way that’s very exciting to me.”
As The Testament Of Ann Lee is about the founder of the Shaker religious movement in the 1700s, and the Shakers were vocal and movement-oriented, there was “no choice but to include” music in any depiction of the group. In that sense, the inclusion of the singing can feel more realistic than it does in a movie like, say, Mamma Mia!. “In Mamma Mia!, everything’s pre-recorded, so I’m not really singing so much as I am just, you know, lip-synching my own voice,” says Seyfried. “With Ann Lee, it’s both. I’m in the studio, and I’m singing live, and it’s being mixed in post.” This experience sounds like it changed the way Seyfried may approach another musical in the future. “I just realized, like, I don’t have to listen to myself anymore,” she says. “I just have to sing from my gut. I just have to sing from my own lived experience. And that sounds different, and it feels different, and you breathe differently, so you become a different animal in a way. And whatever was created while I was singing from that place of my own truth and molding that together with Ann Lee’s truth… it was incredibly fulfilling and revolutionary for me.” Hopefully she can put that to use in whatever the next musical is on her horizon.
The Testament Of Ann Lee is now playing in New York City and Los Angeles. It will expand to more cities on January 16 before opening wide on January 23. You can check out one of the songs from the film below.
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