Tragic Details About Amanda Seyfried

Amanda Seyfried can do it all. She entered our public consciousness as an indelibly dull member of the Plastics in "Mean Girls", she battled vampire Megan Fox in "Jennifer's Body", she sang and danced with queen Meryl Streep herself in "Mama Mia!" (and again in "Mama Mia! Here We Go Again"), and she most recently burned her husky-voiced, Emmy-winning portrayal of Elizabeth Holmes into our minds in "The Dropout." By now she is a Hollywood veteran who lives a dream life with her husband and fellow actor Thomas Sadoski along with their daughter and son. But it hasn't always been as easy as it sounds.

Seyfried's incredible list of iconic accomplishments does not include the many tragic stepping stones that she had to endure to be where she is today. She started quite a while ago, with the "Les Miserables" star beginning her career when she was only 11 years old when she signed to a modeling agency and began the journey that led her to Hollywood. But her ascendent successes would soon be inundated not just with the pressures of being on screen, but also the crippling effects of things you don't know Seyfried endured while being in the public eye.

Amanda Seyfried's distaste for Hollywood's claims to her body began with her first big role. Starring as Karen Smith in the Tina Fey-written "Mean Girls", Seyfried immortalized the character (for better and for worse) with her infamous line in which she appears to predict the weather while touching her chest and saying, "It appears there's a 30% chance it's already raining." 

The joke would manifest into something less funny as boys would come up to her after the film and remark on whether her breasts knew if it was raining. She spoke of the invasion of privacy to Marie Claire. "I always felt really grossed out by that. I was like 18 years old. It was just gross," she said.

Seyfried would continue to act and began to take roles where disrobing and nudity were part of the conversation, even if they were oftentimes uncomfortable ones. In an interview with Net-A-Porter, Seyfried talked about her own naïveté to being asked to do nude scenes when she was still a teenager, saying, "Being 19, walking around without my underwear on — like, are you kidding me? How did I let that happen? Oh, I know why: I was 19 and I didn't want to upset anybody, and I wanted to keep my job. That's why." Seyfried says that she still managed to make it through her younger acting career "pretty unscathed," but she articulated her thoughts succinctly in a 2023 interview with Newsweek. "I just wish I'd been naked less," she said.

In 2013, after an incredible run of acting credits that included not only the aforementioned mega-hits but also films like "Dear John," "In Time", and the show "Big Love," across which she became a household name as she starred alongside Channing Tatum, Justin Timberlake, Bill Paxton and Chloe Sevigny — the pressures of fame made her decide to move away from it all and buy a farmhouse among the Catskill Mountains in New York. She spoke to Marie Claire about the reason for putting some distance between her and Hollywood. "I see these younger actors who think they have to have security," she said. "They think they have to have an assistant. They think their whole world has changed. It can get stressful. I've seen it happen to my peers. So, I bought a farm. I was like, let's go in the opposite way."

Her farmhouse away from it all has become a refuge, serving as a place to get away from the limelight and a place where her kids can go to school. And for Seyfried, it is a place that can quickly give her some much-needed perspective that agents and PR people may not be able to. In speaking to the New York Times, after getting into a shoving match with one of the goats on her farm (and winning), Seyfried remarked, "It's insane how much I can feel so accomplished and successful here without having to be in a successful movie."

Amanda Seyfried has been very open about her mental health struggles, which began with her being diagnosed with OCD when she was 19 and for which she readily admits, in an interview with Allure, to being on a low dose of Lexapro. Seyfried talked about how her struggles with the disorder even dramatically manifested into her thinking that she had a brain tumor. She sought out an MRI and the neurologist who did it found nothing, but they referred her to a psychiatrist to resolve the matter. Seyfried remains unabashed in her advocacy to push past stereotypes of mental illness "A mental illness is a thing that people cast in a different category [from other illnesses], but I don't think it is," she said. "It should be taken as seriously as anything else. You don't see the mental illness: It's not a mass; it's not a cyst. But it's there. Why do you need to prove it? If you can treat it, you treat it."

But even after getting her OCD under control, a new struggle with panic attacks would emerge right before her first off-Broadway performance in 2015. Seyfried was starring in a stage production of "The Way We Get By" and suffered panic attacks onstage. "It feels like you're going to die," she said on an episode of Dr. Berlin's Informed Pregnancy podcast (via Teen Vogue). However, she found ways to manage them, including leaning on her silver lining, as Seyfried was acting alongside her future husband Thomas Sodowski, who could sense what was happening. "He would recognize that thousand-yard stare. And then he would bring me back and the lines would keep flowing, but my whole body would be cold and I'd be sweating at the same time," she said. "And it would only last like 60 seconds, and then we'd get through it."

If you or someone you know needs help with mental health, please contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website.

Amanda Seyfried and her husband Thomas Sodowski welcomed their baby son into the world in September 2020, but the birth had some painful complications. "I had something that went wrong with my second birth," she told People. "The baby was okay but it was tricky and it was painful and it didn't have to happen, and it did so it added an extra level of trauma." She said that it was a physical issue that involved her spine and made the delivery and her recovery complicated.

The difficult experience followed Seyfried and her husband home, as the health issue required her to go back and forth from their house to the hospital. When asked how she and her husband managed to make it through the difficult time, Seyfried told People, "You just do. At that point, I'm very freshly out of the hospital. I had to feed him. My husband was with my daughter and I had people that could drive me back to the hospital." 

She was also very concerned about getting postpartum depression and underwent cognitive behavioral therapy in preparation for having their first child. Seyfried said of her desire to prepare and best handle the condition, "It was hard, and it was so hard, the struggle, but it wasn't anything I didn't think I could handle. And with my second kid, that's partly because I was on my medication and I never got off of it."

It's never easy talking to kids about death, but Amanda Seyfried, as in almost everything she talks about, prefers to be open about it. In 2022, her family dog Finn had a tumor removed and successfully completed chemotherapy. As Finn ages, Seyfried told People that when it comes time to say goodbye to their four-legged family member, she thought the farm has helped prepare their children for the day. "What I've learned living on a farm is that I've been exposed to a lot of death, and it's helped me shape my relationship with it," she said. "And I am almost positive that my kids will have a healthier understanding and appreciation for life and death because of the farm." 

Seyfried adopted Finn while working on the HBO show "Big Love" and only 24 hours after taking him in, she said, "He completely changed my life and helped me find my solitude and my independence." Finn has also helped alleviate some of the difficulties around Seyfried's mental health struggles, with her telling People, "I think he grounded me in a way that nothing else could have." Like much of her life, from fame to farms to family animals, Seyfried has found a way to turn tragedy and hardship into beauty and better health.