Amanda Seyfried had something to prove after Mean Girls

19:57Amanda Seyfried had something to prove after Mean Girls

Amanda Seyfried was 17 when she landed her breakthrough role as Karen Smith in the movie Mean Girls.

Today, she looks back on her time shooting the film as a "complete and utter frenzy of fun," but in an interview with Q's Tom Power, she says there was one thing she was concerned about after Mean Girls became a pop culture phenomenon.

 "I didn't want to get pigeonholed as the ditzy blonde because as fun as it was to play Karen Smith, not everybody is going to write such a perfect character," Seyfried says.

After Mean Girls, Seyfried took on supporting roles in Veronica Mars and Big Love, which were great characters, but not necessarily big departures from what she'd done before.

"Both [characters were] totally, totally different than Karen, but still blonde ingénues," Seyfried explains. "I knew that the ingénue thing was totally fine, but I also knew that I needed to prove something as soon as humanly possible. Because people do not offer you those roles, you have to search for them.

Seyfried says her agent (the same one who got her Mean Girls) "understood the task at hand" and immediately started searching for riskier, more challenging roles.

I needed to prove something as soon as humanly possible.- Amanda Seyfried

The actor counts the beloved cult classic Jennifer's Body among her big wins from that time, adding that she had to do a lot of auditions before landing the part. But her first "true departure" was in Atom Egoyan's 2009 erotic thriller Chloe, in which she plays a mysterious sex worker who's hired by a gynecologist (Julianne Moore) to seduce her husband (Liam Neeson), whom she suspects of infidelity.

"I was going to show the industry … that I was serious," Seyfried says. "And in order to show seriousness, you had to do things that felt risky. And sometimes things that felt 'risky' — these are all in quotes — was doing something sexual…. That was just pushing all the boundaries for someone my age. And I was fully into it."

Now, Seyfried has reunited with Egoyan on the Canadian director's new film, Seven Veils. It follows a theatre director named Jeanine (Seyfried) who re-enters the opera world to stage her former mentor's most famous work.

"The cool thing is, I don't believe that I have departure roles anymore," Seyfried says. "I think that whatever I do is accepted as just another job, and that is a win. That's a true success."

The full interview with Amanda Seyfried is available on our YouTube channel and on our podcast, Q with Tom Power, where she talks more about her role in Seven Veils. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Amanda Seyfried produced by Lise Hosein.