Mamma Mia

Amanda Seyfried: My, what big eyes you've got

After lighting up screens with her bubbly performances in the likes of Mean Girls, Mamma Mia!, Dear John and Letters to Juliet, Amanda Seyfried is finally turning to the dark side. The 25-year-old tackles her first-ever period piece this month with Red Riding Hood, a medieval adaptation of one of our best-loved fairy tales. And it is, she says, “dark and scary”.

“This is such a big deal for me,” says the Pennsylvania-born actress. “I’ve always wanted to do a period piece, and this was way beyond my expectations. The vision was so full of romance and tension and mystery. There are so many things you can do with this story.”

The story is known to most as Little Red Riding Hood, the title given to the account in Charles Perrault’s 1697 fairy tale collection, although the narrative with which we’re more familiar (in which the wolf gets his comeuppance) is that of the Brothers Grimm’s Little Red-Cap. Here, however, the filmmakers omit reference to anyone “little” at all as they expand their story into a full feature narrative. “It’s important to add other elements and to introduce a thriller aspect to give the audience more,” says Seyfried. “The original stories were the just the basis.”

The film casts Seyfried as the heroine, who is caught in a love triangle with two handsome hunks, played by Shiloh Fernandez and Max Irons (the latter, in his first major movie, is the son of Jeremy), when a wolf attacks their village, gobbling up a number of family members. Posses form, the wolf is hunted (it may be a werewolf), Gary Oldman enters the fray as a Van Helsing-type monster-slayer, more people die, and the three principles are drawn into a battle for their lives.

“Our movie is geared for young adults and is more along the lines of the Grimms’ version, with all the sexual tension, suspicion and terror,” says Seyfried.

“There’s a lot of sexual symbolism, and over the years it’s been extracted. And then we kind of put it back in.” She smiles. “Not in the same way, though.” Folklorists and scholars argue endlessly about the meaning and importance of fairy tales, and the Riding Hood story is open to numerous interpretations – the wolf’s consumption of girl and grandmother read, variously, as pregnancy envy, a parable of pubertal desire, or an allegory of rape, depending on whom you read.

But in Seyfried’s film the sexual tension is very much on the surface. “It’s about sex, suspicion and young love,” she says.

Indeed, with the crackling teen tension, wolves, love triangles and an attractive American lead playing opposite two sparring young men, one of whom is a pretty Englishman with an appealing shock of hair, Red Riding Hood echoes with themes and characters that will resound with fans of the Twilight saga, a fact not lost on the studio, which appointed Catherine Hardwicke, who shot the first film in the hit teenage vampire franchise, as the film’s director.

“I sometimes wonder if [Twilight author] Stephenie Meyer was inspired by the original Red Riding Hood stories with her werewolf,” says Hardwicke, “and I think that there are parallels with our film and Twilight.” Certainly, the studio backing the movie would welcome similar returns at the box office, and with Twilight following The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter in putting fantasy adventures back on the map, Hollywood is casting about for suitably bewitching, fantastical fare. Several other live-action fairy tales – the likes of Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters; The Brothers Grimm: Snow White; and Snow White and the Huntsman – are all in the pipeline, while Beastly, a modern-day re‑enactment of Beauty and the Beast, is just around the corner.

How popular the fairy tale boom proves at the box office remains to be seen – Red Riding Hood took $14 million on its opening weekend in the US, and the film will need to do more business internationally if it’s to be regarded as a commercial success. For Seyfried, however, such matters are beyond her immediate concern. “It feels really cool to bring to life that iconic character,” she says. “I hope that it is respected and welcomed.”

While she’s taking a darker path on screen, Seyfried remains an effervescent interviewee. Even as her star rose, she eschewed Hollywood conventions by happily chatting about her relationship with English actor Dominic Cooper. The two met on set of the hit 2008 movie Mamma Mia! and began dating a short while later, although they recently broke up.

The actress, however, was upbeat when we met, and was looking forward to a trip to London for last night’s Red Riding Hood premiere. “I’m not taking anything to London,” she beamed. “It’s going to be a good trip and I’m not apprehensive about going back. I miss it so much, and anyway he’s not going to be there. He’s away shooting, although we are very much in touch.”

Seyfried returns to the screen later this year, too, with her first science-fiction movie, Now, from director Andrew Nicol; further evidence, perhaps, of her pitch towards darker material. “The concept is amazing, and very far-fetched, and has a lot of metaphor. It’s really smart.” She was also under consideration for the role of Daisy Buchanan alongside Red Riding Hood producer Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby and her reputation suffered not at all when she lost out to Carey Mulligan; Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson were also said to be in the running.

“I’m going to be having a bit of break after the trip to London,” she says, “and I’m happy. Things are looking good right now.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/starsandstories/8437004/Amanda-Seyfried-My-what-big-eyes-youve-got.html

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