Amanda Seyfried’s 2025 Glow-Up: Golden Globes, Shakers, and a Triple-Threat Year
Amanda Seyfried’s 2025: Musicals, Mystics, and a Double Golden Globe Nod
Amanda Seyfried’s 2025 has shaped up to be one of the most defining years of her career, with three starring roles and two Golden Globe nominations that underscore her evolution from teen-movie standout to consistently daring character actor. From the eccentric movie musical The Testament of Ann Lee to the moody crime limited series Long Bright River, Seyfried is steering directly into complex, off-center roles that challenge both her and her audience.
With awards chatter building around both her musical turn and her television work, Seyfried’s tally for the year—three starring roles, two Golden Globe nominations—feels less like a hot streak and more like a deliberate second act in a career that’s been quietly leveling up for over a decade.
From Mean Girls to Mystic Musicals: How Seyfried Got Here
Seyfried’s current awards-season heat doesn’t arrive in a vacuum. She first broke into mainstream pop culture as Karen in Mean Girls (2004), then steadily worked through prestige-adjacent material: Big Love, Les Misérables, Mamma Mia!, and a revelatory turn as Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout, which earned her an Emmy and a Golden Globe.
What makes 2025 notable is the concentration of daring choices: a spiritual, historically grounded musical anchored by a celibate, egalitarian sect, paired with a gritty, opioid-epidemic crime drama. It’s a far cry from the easy comfort of jukebox ABBA, and it signals that Seyfried is not interested in coasting on nostalgia or safe roles.
“I’m drawn to women whose beliefs or choices make people uncomfortable at first glance. Once you sit with them, they start to feel inevitable.”
That instinct—to locate empathy within figures that might initially read as opaque, off-putting, or extreme—threads through her 2025 work, especially in The Testament of Ann Lee.
The Testament of Ann Lee: A Movie Musical About Shakers, Celibacy, and Radical Equality
On paper, a movie musical about an 18th‑century religious movement that preaches celibacy, gender and racial equality, and pacifism sounds like a doomed studio pitch. In execution, The Testament of Ann Lee leans into the strangeness and ends up feeling oddly current—somewhere between a spiritual cousin to Jesus Christ Superstar and a sober corrective to the way American culture usually flattens sects into punchlines.
Seyfried plays Ann Lee, the English-born leader of the Shakers, with a mix of fragility and steel. The film frames her not as a cult caricature but as a woman trying to invent a livable world in the wreckage of patriarchy and violence. That she’s doing this through a doctrine of celibacy and ecstatic worship makes the role both emotionally and physically demanding.
- Performance style: Vocal work that’s more character-driven than showy, prioritizing emotional precision over pure belt.
- Character arc: From persecuted visionary to a leader burdened by the consequences of her own doctrine.
- Visual language: Choreography and camera work that echo communal rituals—circles, repeated gestures, and a lot of negative space.
“We wanted the musical numbers to feel like acts of worship and doubt at the same time. Amanda understood that contradiction instinctively.”
The Golden Globe recognition for her work here speaks to Hollywood’s ongoing fascination with religious outsiders, from Silence to First Reformed, but filtered through the more populist language of musical theater.
Long Bright River: Seyfried’s Gritty Turn in a Limited Series
Seyfried’s second Golden Globe nomination of 2025 comes from television, in the “best actress in a limited series” category, for Long Bright River. Adapted from Liz Moore’s novel, the series is set against the backdrop of the opioid crisis, tracking a Philadelphia cop and her estranged sister through a web of addiction, corruption, and unresolved grief.
This isn’t Seyfried’s first foray into prestige TV after The Dropout, but it is one of her most grounded performances—less performative transformation, more worn-in realism. She moves through the show with hunched shoulders and an exhausted gaze that feels ripped from a documentary.
- Emotional tone: Slow-burn, with outbursts that feel earned rather than scripted.
- Genre blend: Crime procedural, family drama, and social-issue series rolled into one.
- Awards appeal: The kind of prestige-limited-series lane that the Globes and Emmys love.
“Streaming has changed how we think about ‘leading roles.’ A limited series now gives an actor the same narrative room a novel does. Seyfried uses every page.”
Three Starring Roles, Two Golden Globes: What 2025 Says About Seyfried’s Career Strategy
The headline for 2025 is simple enough—three starring roles, two Golden Globe nominations—but the pattern underneath matters. Seyfried is choosing material that:
- Centers morally complicated women rather than likable ones.
- Lives at the intersection of social issues and emotionally intimate storytelling.
- Allows for formal risk—musical structures, limited-series pacing, historical reinterpretation.
In a crowded awards landscape where names like Emma Stone, Saoirse Ronan, and Lily Gladstone dominate film conversations, Seyfried is carving out a lane closer to “quietly essential character lead” than “headline-making movie star.” That might be the more sustainable position in an era when streaming, theatrical releases, and limited series all compete for the same cultural bandwidth.
Review: How Strong Is Seyfried’s 2025 Work Really?
Taken together, Seyfried’s 2025 performances earn a solid 4.5 out of 5. They’re not flawless, but they’re consistently interesting in a way that’s rarer than pure perfection.
Strengths
- Range: Moving between musical expressionism and grounded naturalism without losing a coherent sense of self.
- Risk tolerance: Signing onto a Shaker musical in 2025 is a choice; delivering a performance awards bodies respond to is another.
- Character empathy: She specializes in finding interiority in characters who could easily be reduced to types or memes.
Weaknesses
- Vocal limitations: In The Testament of Ann Lee, her singing sometimes favors restraint over power; viewers expecting a Les Mis-style vocal showcase may feel underwhelmed.
- Understated choices: In Long Bright River, her quiet approach can occasionally blend into the gloom of the show’s palette, especially alongside more overtly showy supporting turns.
- Visibility vs. impact: With three starring roles in one year, there’s a risk that none gets the singular cultural moment that, say, The Dropout enjoyed.
“Seyfried is in her ‘character actor in a leading lady’s body’ phase, and 2025 is the year the industry finally caught up to that reality.”
Still, the balance tilts decisively toward “must-watch.” Even the rough edges feel like the product of risk rather than complacency, which is exactly where you want an actor in their late-30s career phase to be.
Cultural Context: Why a Shaker Musical Makes Sense in 2025
It might seem wildly niche to build a prestige musical around Shakers in the streaming era, but the themes resonate with contemporary anxieties. Communities built on radical equality, chosen family, and pacifism look less like relics and more like alternative timelines we never took.
In a media landscape captivated by cult documentaries and true-crime podcasts, The Testament of Ann Lee flips the script by asking what it means to build a faith around refusal—of sex, of violence, of ownership—rather than indulgence. Seyfried’s performance functions as a human bridge between that austere idealism and a modern audience skeptical of any organized belief.
Trailers & First Impressions
While the full rollout of The Testament of Ann Lee and Long Bright River has been heavily orchestrated, the early trailers do a neat job of showcasing Seyfried’s duality: wide-eyed, near-mystical fervor in one project; clenched-jaw resignation in the other.
For accessibility and international audiences, both studios have leaned into clear subtitling and descriptive captions, a welcome trend as awards contenders increasingly premiere on streaming platforms worldwide.
Watch official trailers on their respective platforms or via:
- Studio YouTube channels for The Testament of Ann Lee and Long Bright River.
- Embedded teasers on the films’ and series’ official sites.
Where Amanda Seyfried Goes After a Year Like This
Whether or not she walks away with a Golden Globe, Seyfried’s 2025 feels like a pivot point—less about collecting trophies than about announcing, quietly but firmly, that she’s entering her “no-safety-net” phase. A Shaker musical, a grim limited series, and a still-busy film slate all point to an actor who’s finally embracing the full weirdness and seriousness of her talents.
In an entertainment industry that often boxes actors into whatever first hit big—rom-coms, horror, blockbuster IP—Seyfried is doing something deceptively simple and genuinely rare: refusing the box. If 2025 is any indication, the most interesting Amanda Seyfried performances are still ahead of us.
