Amanda Seyfried on playing a director in ‘Seven Veils’: ‘It was really challenging’

Amanda Seyfried is a theater director re-entering the opera world in the new film Seven Veils.

Directed by Seyfried’s frequent collaborator Atom Egoyan, the film comes to select theaters nationwide on Friday.

It was shot on location during the staging of Egoyan’s acclaimed 2023 production of the opera Salome, and the meta-nature of that fact was not lost on Seyfried. She told ABC Audio that Egoyan, who had staged the opera seven or eight times prior, wanted to do something different with this staging — so he wrote a movie script to produce alongside it.

“It was just a lot of parallels mixing together,” Seyfried said. “It does happen in movies often, where you’re playing characters that have crazy parallels to your own life. But to have crazy parallels to your own life and also to the director’s life, and having the director hold control over all of it, is really exciting.”

Still, the idea of being directed to play a director was daunting, Seyfried said.

“It’s a little intimidating portraying a director in front of one of your favorite directors,” she said. “When the day came where I was portraying ‘director’ and getting on set, on the stage, and trying to pull out these performances from these people that really weren’t meeting me halfway — it was really challenging.”

Seyfried said she found herself “a little lost at times,” but that Egoyan was “so amazing and supportive.”

“It was hard because sometimes I’m just not in my body as much as I want to be,” Seyfried said. “I think I’m learning that I am capable of that. I just have to work a little harder.”