When it rains in L.A., no one blames anyone for anything. The sultry and gentle compact with nature is broken then, and everyone tries to just get by. So now that it's been raining for five days, why worry that Amanda Seyfried looks a bit housebound, wearing a mopsy little hoodie, too-loose sweatpants, and a pair of underused running shoes? Hood up, zipped up, purse clamped to her side like a knitting bag, she peers from inside the getup, gives a tick of a smile. "It's you," she says, over the hiss of rain on the skin of the parking lot, offering her hand, small and cool as a teaspoon. Just then, she allows a glimpse of her eyes, or she gives it. Or you steal it. Who can say? The eyes demand an adjective; they beg for a simile.
In those first moments outside the crowded gourmet shop in the Hollywood Hills, Seyfried says nothing particular. It's not that she has nothing to say. She can rev up the chatter engine when she wants to. It's just that the plan had been to sit outside, so there's a sigh and a kind of you-believe-this-shit nudge at the world before she sets out up the street, the eyes scanning the boulevard storefronts for a place to talk.
It's her: the twenty-four-year-old actress who emerged from adolescence as the sexy Mormon daughter on HBO's Big Love. She was the most memorable of Tina Fey's mean girls, which is to say, the dumb one. The most memorable corpus delicti in last year's Jennifer's Body, which is to say, the needy one. The single sunny nod to youth as Meryl Streep's daughter in the creepily nostalgic vapor that was Mamma Mia! Her days of playing a teenager might have ended, though — just — with her intense and sexy pass as a call girl in Chloe, which opens March 26. Right there in the dim light of a damp afternoon, it's Amanda Seyfried, peeking into the doorways of businesses that can't quite decide if they're open.
Finally she locates a deserted bar that isn't serving lunch, where she plops down and pulls out a plastic box containing enough tabbouleh to stuff a softball. "I'm on a raw-food diet," she declares, raising her brows to make her eyes even bigger. "It's intense. And sort of awful. Yesterday for lunch? Spinach. Just spinach. Spinach and some seeds." She says the last word, seeds, and leans into the long vowel sound, scrunching her nose, making the word sound like a comic discovery. At times Seyfried traipses along as if she were the only one in the room who doesn't know she's adorable.
They don't easily offer up forks in otherwise deserted bars, so Seyfried doesn't start on the tabbouleh right away. Instead she shows a picture of her new dog, an Australian shepherd. "It's so predictable," she says. "I just left him and I already want to run back and see him."
Puppies are like that. True. But why lop off the edges of your freedom when you're young enough to use that freedom fully?
"Most of the time I just want to go home and throw the dog a stick," Seyfried says. "Can anything be more obvious than throwing a stick? I need to be needed."
Glasses of water arrive. Seyfried allows that it might be foolish to get a dog when you live alone, travel a lot, and work all hours. She tilts her head. "I understand that the need is never with the dog."
As she eats the tabbouleh, she covers her mouth with her fingers. This is unnecessary, and reassurances are given: It won't be necessary to mention if she gets tabbouleh stuck in her teeth. She chews.
"Oh, I will have tabbouleh in my teeth," she says. "It is inevitable. Just go ahead and say it." She shows her choppers. There's tabbouleh in her teeth.
"I would tell you," she says. "I would always tell somebody if they had shit on their face." It's agreed that this is a test of character. "Especially if it's really feces." Seyfried picks back and forth through the tabbouleh as if she were looking for a ring. She's a pal.
"Well, I'm a BFF," she deadpans. "I play a BFF. It's what I do. I have an actual necklace from Jennifer's Body that says BFF. That's my role right there."
Not in Chloe it isn't. In Chloe, she plays a call girl hired by a woman, played by Julianne Moore, to seduce her husband, played by Liam Neeson. Chloe then meets with the woman to describe the sex to her. Creepiness ensues. Seyfried spends a decent portion of the movie naked or seminaked.
When the tabbouleh is nearly gone, talk turns to the fact that she's leaving. She's departing Big Love after her fourth year and is preparing to move to New York. "I sacrificed six years in L. A.," she says. "I did my job out here. I made the contacts and did the work I had to do. But I came here at eighteen. I'm out of here at twenty-four, and I feel lucky it wasn't longer."
The anxiety rises in her as she speaks, and she cracks open her purse, shakes a Lexapro into her hand. She halves it, then pops a birth-control pill from its foil pack and swallows both. "Yeah, yeah, I'm anxious," she says. "And yes, I use birth control." She cocks her big eyes upward. Water is running off the roof, rattling the shit out of a gutter somewhere. Her eyes seem to search for the sound, and it makes you wonder what she was thinking when she looked out at the photographer who took the photos that ended up on these pages. "I learned a long time ago that photographs are not theater. This is not acting. It's pretending. I pretend I'm looking at a man who is looking right at me, a man who sees me as exceptionally clever and adventurous."
She looks up at the ceiling without tilting her head. "It sounds like it's running through the walls," she says. When she was eighteen, her eyes conveyed innocence, at once Mormonic and comically moronic. When she's thirty-two, she'll use them to lay a man down. Right now, it's a measure of worry, a measure of wonder. Her eyes demand an adjective, beg for a simile. Her eyes are winsome, like two parachutes.
Published in the April 2010 issue.
