How ‘Long Bright River' Star Amanda Seyfried and Showrunner Nikki Toscano Recast the True Crime Formula
Amanda Seyfried has tackled plenty of different roles: a Golden Age of Hollywood starlet, the perpetrator of Silicon Valley's greatest known scam, an adult film icon, a dim high schooler with an uncanny knack for predicting the weather. But she's never played a cop, as much as she's wanted to.
'No one looks at me and thinks 'cop,'' Seyfried said during a recent THR Frontrunners panel. 'And then someone did.'
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The Emmy winner and Oscar nominee plays a Philadelphia police officer in Peacock's Long Bright River, an adaptation of Liz Moore's best-selling novel of the same name. And the 'someone' Seyfried referred to is co-creator, showrunner and executive producer Nikki Toscano, who'd been working on adapting Moore's material for some time before she made an ovation for Seyfried to come on board as a star and executive producer.
'We totally courted her,' said Toscano, who wrote the series alongside Moore. 'There's something so lovely about Amanda because she's just puts it out there. She doesn't want to be going through reps. She just wants to have an open conversation [about the material].'
Seyfried's first spin on playing law enforcement isn't exactly a conventional one. While there is a serial killer and a slow-revealing puzzle around her character's missing sister, Long Bright River mostly keeps the mystery box elements in the back seat.
'What was so unique [about] Liz's novel was this love story between these two sisters juxtaposed against this murder mystery,' added Toscano. 'In order to solve not only the murder mystery, but her sister's disappearance, [Amanda's] character has to reflect on their collective past and her role in their estrangement.'
That's not to say Seyfried didn't just enjoy her scenes in uniform.
'I'd totally play a cop again,' said Seyfried. 'I respect the job and love portraying the good ones … And the uniform is transformative. Daniel Day-Lewis always talks about those fucking shoes, and he's right. The uniform just goes 10,000 miles further.'
Long Bright River marks a few firsts. Toscano, who previously served as showrunner on Amazon's Hunters and the Paramount+ miniseries The Offer, made her directorial debut with episode six of the limited series. 'As a showrunner, you are the person that is there every day when the directors are coming in and out,' she said. 'So there is something really, really nice about just having a very direct relationship with your cast and not passing a message along.'
Apparently Toscano's first time directing went so well, her star didn't even realize she hadn't done it before.
'What?' Seyfried exclaimed on the panel. 'I didn't know that! She's a fucking pro. She knows what she's doing.'
All eight episodes of Long Bright River are now streaming on Peacock. Watch the rest of the panel interview, which includes Seyfried going from a Manchester accent to a Tulsa drawl in the same sentence, in the video above. This edition of THR Frontrunners is sponsored by NBCUniversal.
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