Amanda Seyfried lost the Regina George part and built a career anyway
Amanda Seyfried read for the queen bee, Regina George, in Mean Girls, but the producers handed her Karen Smith, the dim sidekick. That consolation role opened the door to an Oscar nomination for Mank, an Emmy and a Golden Globe for playing Elizabeth Holmes, and leading films that have earned over $2.4 billion.
Allentown, Pennsylvania, is where Seyfried grew up after her birth on December 3, 1985, the daughter of an occupational therapist and a pharmacist. She was modelling by eight and turned up on three Sweet Valley High covers. At 17 she gave modelling up, took a waitressing job at a retirement community, and spent her spare time on opera, singing lessons and sessions with a Broadway coach. Daytime television came first: she played Lucy Montgomery on As the World Turns from 2000 to 2001, then Joni Stafford on All My Children.
A place at Fordham University was waiting in 2003, yet she turned it down once Mean Girls came calling. The comedy took more than $130 million, and its four young stars shared an MTV Movie Award as best on-screen team. Rejection shaped her early years in other ways too. Kristen Bell won the title role in Veronica Mars, so Seyfried played Lilly Kane, the murdered best friend glimpsed only in flashbacks. Her profile grew on HBO's Big Love, where from 2006 she was Sarah Henrickson, a daughter at odds with her family's polygamous faith; she quit after the fourth season to concentrate on films.
Mamma Mia!, opposite Meryl Streep, gave her a first lead and became the fifth biggest earner of 2008, with five of her vocal performances on the soundtrack. Dear John drew harsh reviews in 2010 but still knocked Avatar off the top of the American box office, and she wrote and recorded a song, Little House, for it. As Cosette in the 2012 screen version of Les Misérables she joined a film that grossed $440 million worldwide.
The heavier parts arrived later. Playing the actress Marion Davies in David Fincher's Mank (2020) earned her an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. Her turn as the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the Hulu series The Dropout (2022) collected both a Golden Globe and a Primetime Emmy, and Time put her among its 100 most influential people that same year.
Source: Amanda Seyfried
