Amanda Seyfried admired her “fearless” character Mickey Fitzpatrick in “Long Bright River”.
“She doesn’t have a good bedside manner and rubs people the wrong way. But she just doesn’t care what they think, which is something I wish I could absorb, because I care too much. And that gets in the way of a lot of situations for me,” she tells Variety.
“The part of Mickey that I love so much is that she’s a slow burn. You find out she’s fucked up a lot. She’s not a perfect person. She’s just fighting her way, like all of us.”
In Peacock’s series, now heading to French festival Series Mania, she plays a Philadelphia police officer, investigating the murder of three women. And fearing that her addict sister, who disappeared a long time ago, might be in danger as well.
“Show me someone who hasn’t a relationship to addiction. For me, it brought up a lot of stuff. It tears people apart,” says Seyfried.
“We need more support and, especially in America, we need to understand it more. We need to learn what people suffering from substance use disorder really need – not what we think they need. It’s a disease. It’s god-awful. But you can also recover.”
Nicholas Pinnock, Ashleigh Cummings, Callum Vinson and John Doman star alongside Seyfried, known for “Mean Girls,” “Mamma Mia!” and her take on Elizabeth Holmes’ rise and fall in miniseries “The Dropout,” which earned her an Emmy.
“The thing that attracts me the most, or that really takes hold of me when I’m watching something, is when I feel this person is real. There’s so much happening you can’t help but be on Mickey’s side, despite the way she handles things and the mistakes she makes,” she says.
“She’s not the best mother, but she communicates with her son in a way that’s maybe not right for his age, but kind of beautiful. You do end up wanting to support her and you do end up loving her. At the same time, she’s not an open book. She comes from trauma and she’s got a lot of guilt and a lot of shame, which we all do.”
“What’s unique about this series is that it’s not just a crime show. It’s also a family drama and it’s as important to unpack this love story between two sisters as it is to unpack this murder mystery,” notes Nikki Toscano, who co-created the Sony Pictures Television-produced show with Liz Moore.
“Only when our main character is reflecting on her own family drama, she’s able to not only solve the mystery of her sister’s disappearance but also solve the identity of the killer.”
Giving agency to an underserved community was also crucial, Toscano points out.
“One of the things this series aims to do is not only to upend the savior narrative, but to upend the victim narrative. It was our North Star in pretty much every decision we made. We had a ton of conversations about portraying this world the way Mickey sees it, which is with humanity and compassion,” she observes.
“She’s flawed and she’s not a great police officer, but her one superpower is that she’s from that neighborhood. She grew up with these women, her sister being amongst them.”
Seyfried agrees: “We want to know what these people are feeling and doing, and why. We put ourselves in everybody else’s shoes. The compassion is fully there. These are human beings: we’re all human beings. We should be trying to support each other from that point of view, as opposed to fear, which is why this community is so marginalized.”
As the show goes on, both sisters – raised by their grandfather following the loss of their parents – have to deal with their past and “multi-generational trauma as it pertains to addiction,” notes Toscano, who wanted to tackle “what it’s like to be a person suffering from substance use disorder and a person who loves them.”
“There are definitely things that happened before the story takes place that really changed their lives. These two sisters are living two very, very different lives in the same place. It’s a real struggle,” sums it up Seyfried.
“The secrets, the things that come to light throughout the series are hard truths. It’s a lot, but that’s life.”
“It’s hard to even talk about it, because it’s fucking beautiful. A lot happens, but there’s something that really is striking and moving, and it does offer relief, necessary at the end of a show like this. You need to believe it wasn’t all for nothing. And you need to believe there’s a future for a lot of people.”