Amanda Seyfried might be most famous for her roles in “Mean Girls,” “Mamma Mia!” and “Big Love,” but it wasn’t until I saw “Jennifer’s Body” that we became friends — in my mind at least. Her feisty portrayal of Needy, the accidentally murderous nerd who takes down Jennifer, a literal man-eating demon, made me sure we’d be besties.
This year, she stars in two vastly different films that highlight her range as an actor. In “The Housemaid,” she plays Nina, a suburban wife with a secret, and she has the title role in “The Testament of Ann Lee,” a dramatic musical about one of the founders of the Shakers, a religious sect that originated in the 18th century.
We invited her to the New York Times Cooking kitchen studio for a lesson in how to make Parmesan cabbage soup and spent an afternoon chopping, simmering and chatting about acting, motherhood, goats, parents and her deep love of Polish food.
Credit…Victoria Chen
The transcript below has been edited and condensed.
So do you cook? I do not.
You don’t at all. No, but I can make eggs and cereal.
What do you do to your eggs? I fluff them. I whip them fast until it doesn’t look so chunky. And I have my own eggs and my own hens. They’re small, but they’re very yolky. Very orange yolk.
I know I saw your farm! Do you grow vegetables on the farm? My mom does. Mesclun and kale and cucumbers, and lots of tomatoes and raspberries and blueberries.
Is she the cook? Who cooks in your family? My husband cooks. My mom is not a good cook. If my dad were cooking, he would only ever cook a tuna casserole. And mustard in a way that shouldn’t be used. I just like, [gags], I don’t wanna think about it. Not good cooks! But I will say, I’m good with bland. I grew up without salt. I didn’t really know about it.
So when you first discovered salt, were you like, wait, there’s flavor in food? Like, cheese has a flavor, no matter what, right? And we used a lot of it. So that was my salt.
What else do you remember? Porcupine balls. It’s ground beef or ground chicken or ground turkey with rice and they’re balls. And they, oh my god, the sauce. She [my mom] makes it every year for my birthday. Stewed tomatoes and onions and wine, and she always adds flour to her sauce. The perfect meal.
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What do you love to bake? Cookies. Shortbread.
That’s so funny because shortbreads were the first cookies I ever started to make because they’re so easy. Yeah, there’s no ingredients.
Right, you can just do them with whatever you have. Your sugar, your butter, and your flour and you just squish them together. And they always taste good. I make strawberry shortbread cookies. I used to make them on sets and just hand them out in little plastic baggies and tie them and have a little note and I would give them away, especially the strawberry ones. It’s very fun to bake for people.
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Should we talk about your movies? You saw both of them?
Of course I saw both of them! Because I knew you were coming over. That’s a hefty afternoon.
They’re such different characters, and they’re coming out at the exact same time. How do you wrap your head around these two very different characters? It’s like theater school, which I never got to go to. It’s really fun to just do something completely opposite. Both characters are super dynamic, and there’s so much to mine from. My whole career has been designed in a way to keep audiences guessing and to keep myself interested and excited. Because if it’s something I’ve done a million times, I’m not going to be excited about it and I’m not going to want to go to work.
“Ann Lee” looks like it was really hard to film. Those movies are made on a dime. We’re, like, stretched thin with scheduling. And then we’re doing all these big dance numbers, and I’m singing live and it’s just very physical. But it’s also the more physical it is, the more fulfilling it is in a way. Because you’re relating to yourself in a different way, and something that you’re doing physically over and over and over again in 100-degree weather can kind of make you almost feel, like, the adrenaline, and the exhaustion can only almost take you to a euphoric place. Which is what Ann Lee and her followers [did] so it kinda works. Grueling. But also that’s why we do it. Because if there’s something challenging, even like a recipe, you cannot figure out, once you do figure it out …
Then it’s yours forever. It’s yours forever. And you’re so empowered.
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