Amanda Seyfried Sings—and Screams—in The Testament of Ann Lee

Before she emerged as a founding leader of the Shakers in the mid-18th century, Ann Lee gave birth to four children. All of them died in infancy. Lee grieved these losses in quick succession, then dreamed up a rebellious Christian sect that advocated for total celibacy, the abandonment of marriage, and female leadership. Mona Fastvold’s new film, The Testament of Ann Lee, imagines Ann’s personal tragedy as a fateful turning point—dramatizing it as an alternately ecstatic and harrowing musical sequence, choreographed with precision and performed at an operatic scale by star Amanda Seyfried. The goal was not to transport the audience, but to ground Ann’s experiences in spiritual realism.

“Amanda and I were both very excited about having the births be as real and direct and graphic and unapologetic as possible,” Fastvold says. “And it was very brave of Amanda. She was so open and willing to do it—the blood and the breast milk and everything, being open with her body and her sexuality.” Seyfried adds, “It was really important for us to get the best prosthetics we could possibly get for birthing vaginas. It’s definitely not a joke, but we had a lot of vaginas on this—because we were capturing something relevant to so many millions of people. We had to do it right, and had to do her life justice.”

That’s Ann Lee in a nutshell: a technically rigorous, unfailingly original passion project that’s still seeking distribution ahead of its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Fastvold hatched the idea after she came across a Shaker hymn while wrapping The World to Come, her 2020 period drama starring Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby. The Oslo native then started learning about the Shakers, anomalies in American history—beyond the rarity of this group being led by women, the Shakers crafted more than 1,000 songs to sing and dance to without inhibition during worship. The last active Shaker community in the US currently counts just three people—which is actually one more than there were a few weeks ago.

“I felt possessed by it. I thought there was something so interesting about this celibate movement just bursting with sensual ecstasy,” Fastvold says. “That, to me, was deeply cinematic.”

Fastvold dove into Ann Lee while still at work on The Brutalist, the lauded immigrant epic helmed by her partner, Brady Corbet. Corbet and Fastvold cowrote the screenplays for both films—getting an Oscar nod for The Brutalist—and while making each, Fastvold saw how big-ticket cinema could be realized on a budget that was anything but. “I don’t want to give anyone the wrong idea; they’re very, very different movies. But both are about people who are drawn to creating something, to doing something that is impossible, and who dedicate their entire life to that,” Fastvold says.

Shot on 70mm film and with gonzo ambition, Ann Lee had the same approximate budget as The Brutalist—under $10 million. “We had even more tricks up our sleeves, and we really, really needed them. We had a ship at sea; we had storms; we had all these massive setpieces,” Fastvold says of Ann Lee. “I wanted the movie to feel epic and exciting, and I just absolutely did not have the money to do so…. Much like on The Brutalist, if I moved the camera two feet to the right, it’d look like shit. I could only design so much—and I had to stick to the plan.”

Ann Lee, whose father was a blacksmith by day and a tailor by night, grew up poor and illiterate in Manchester, England. She immigrated to New York in 1774, bringing along just six followers—including her loyal brother, William (played by Lewis Pullman), and lowly husband, Abraham (Christopher Abbott). By the time of her death a decade later, she’d created one of the largest utopian societies in American history. The group was collectively convinced she’d emerged as the female incarnation of Christ. Fastvold concedes that the Shaker experiment had its faults—“celibacy is a complicated solution,” she says—but found great inspiration in Lee’s vision.

“She took this horrible trauma and turned that suffering into compassion, into community, into how she could mother the world,” Fastvold says. “It’s all about worship through labor, creating something of beauty and of meaning and giving everything you have to it. As someone who wishes to try and create impossible things, that really spoke to me.”

A veteran of big-screen musicals including Les Misérables and Mamma Mia!, Seyfried has been friendly with both Fastvold and Corbet (who also produced Ann Lee) for years. “When you trust somebody as much as I trust Mona, you can’t help but go into the light,” she says. “But I just didn’t believe that I could embody someone who led this type of charge, in this time period.” Seyfried had already taken on a very different kind of cult-adjacent leader in The Dropout, winning an Emmy for her portrayal of scammer entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes—but Ann Lee’s demands were especially daunting. “This felt further from me than anything that I can remember.”

Seyfried worried most about pulling off Ann’s 18th-century Manchester accent, which she devised—effectively, made up—alongside Fastvold and a dialect coach. “The ecstatic dancing and thumping and pounding, the frenzy that the Shakers lived in—I love that. It makes me feel alive,” Seyfried says. “That’s not the thing that intimidates me.” About five months before filming, she started recording songs at Fastvold and Corbet’s apartment with composer Daniel Blumberg (who won an Oscar for The Brutalist and made his feature-film debut on The World to Come). “I was amazed by how she was singing, dancing, getting water thrown over her face,” Blumberg says of Seyfried. “It was such an extreme job.”

Blumberg developed what Fastvold calls a “radical score” based on mostly existing Shaker hymns before composing an original song that plays as the end credits roll. The pair introduced the cast to improvisational singing via vocalists like Shelley Hirsch and Maggie Nicols, honing Ann Lee’s soundscape to feel as primal as possible.

“It’s prayer—it’s not entertainment. So it was important to find strong intent in the way you were using your voice, in the way you were moving your body,” Fastvold says. “It was definitely the most experimental project that I’ve ever worked on,” Blumberg agrees. He was constantly adding and subtracting, finessing tones and rhythms. One day while in New York, Blumberg walked by a music shop and came across a “little bell” from the 1700s. “Suddenly, the bell was all over the film,” he says.

The sound mix we hear in the final film uses those pre-shoot recordings, live singing from Seyfried et al. on set, and studio sessions that took place mere months ago. Seyfried kept reaching deeper and deeper into Ann’s internal life, with Hirsch and Nicols’s exercises encouraging her to run wild. “So much of it was screaming and doing weird takes. I had these crazy moments of complete freedom—the weirder, the better,” Seyfried says. “I was, like, ‘So, basically, we can do whatever the fuck we want.’ But it’s got to come from somewhere—it’s got to be grounded in something. You could ruin your fucking voice, I’ll tell you that.”

Even Fastvold was impressed. “I couldn’t believe the sounds coming out of you in the end,” she tells Seyfried during our joint interview.

Ann Lee culminates in a fiery sequence set during the American Revolutionary War, a conflict in which the Shakers refused to take a side. “Every time I thought I could take a breath, to take a pause in my acting, I was screaming. I would see another camera in my periphery that was moving, and I’m, like, ‘I just can’t get out of the scene,’” Seyfried says. “That was one of the maddest, wildest shots and setups that I’ve ever seen. But for whatever reason, it wasn’t stressful for me.” (She did worry for Lewis Pullman, however: “I love him so much. What a sweet boy. He was truly struggling, but he was committed to the scene, so he was shaking like a leaf to get through it.”)

Intense as the 34-day shoot may have been, Seyfried doesn’t sound drained from making Ann Lee. The maximalist work rather left her energized and rethinking how she will move forward as an actor. “It shifted my needs. I think I’ll be working less because of it, but because I will be choosing to work less,” Seyfried says. “I was working too much.” She even felt liberated by Fastvold’s no-makeup rule. “I couldn’t get Botox for a year,” she says with a smile. “That was a big assignment…. When I first got [Botox], I was, like, This is amazing—because I frown a lot. But then it all came back in a way that was absolutely necessary for all the work I was doing.”

Mona Fastvold and Amanda Seyfried in March.

Kristina Bumphrey/Getty Images

Fastvold still isn’t quite sure how to categorize Ann Lee. “Do you think it’s a musical?” she asks at one point, clearly working out the answer herself. I say that I do, for the most part—and ask if she feels the same way. “I don’t know. I really don’t,” Fastvold says. “I just wanted to tell this story from their perspective—to bring this wonderful naivete and joy to it. I didn’t want to ridicule them.”

Fastvold was raised in a secular household and remains skeptical of organized religion. Yet The Testament of Ann Lee is steeped in empathy and respect for the way the Shakers hold and express such firm beliefs. The degree to which the movie is classifiable as a musical—which will surely be debated upon premiere, dense as the soundtrack may be—can be credited entirely to Fastvold’s determination to capture this group of people as they authentically lived.

That effort went well beyond the songs. Seyfried and her colleagues would call Fastvold “Mona Mother” while filming; in fact, they still call her that. Crew members flying from the US into Budapest, where production took place, brought along their partners and kids and pets. “I like maternal leadership,” Fastvold says. “So, sure, I’m Mother. I’ll happily be the mother.”

Seyfried took on similar responsibility. “Being soft and being patient is way more effective than other means of gaining control or keeping a community empowered,” she says. “My job as the lead actor is to add to that working vibe.” She felt Ann’s presence throughout the making of the movie: “We weren’t weird about it, but she was around. If you could say this movie is partly one big séance, I would say we succeeded at conjuring her.”

The Testament of Ann Lee will premiere at the Venice Film Festival and is currently seeking US distribution. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall film festival coverage, including first looks and exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names set to hit Venice, Telluride, and Toronto.