Amanda Seyfried has revealed that she learned to play the entirety of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ for a biopic project that got shelved.
The star has been backed to play the music icon on screen for a while, gaining widespread support last year after performing a viral cover of ‘California’ on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon.
However, Seyfried has now revealed that she had actually been attached to portray Mitchell in a film for a number of years beforehand, and learnt to play the dulcimer during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was a movie about her and [manager] Elliot Roberts,” she explained to GQ. “Then he died – but not before I met him.”
The actress met Mitchell in her home, where the singer recalled many stories and put on her seminal album ‘Blue’.
“She’s like, ‘We’ll put on the album and light a fire,’” Seyfried recalled. “After we listened to the album, she’s like, ‘It’s sparse, isn’t it?’” Feigning fainting, the actress told her: “It’s perfect!”
The star went on to learn the whole album in lockdown, sharing: “The day that I finished learning the last song on the album, ‘[The Last Time I Saw] Richard’, I fucking wept. I felt like a bona fide musician, like I belong here. I felt like I had put my own flag on the top of the mountain. Because it was a fucking mountain, I tell you.”
However, the project never got off the ground, with Cameron Crowe’s subsequently announced film separate from the one that Seyfried was involved in – though people have been pushing for him to cast her.
“Apparently a lot of people reached out to Cameron Crowe and were like, ‘What the fuck are you doing, dude?’” the star said. “I don’t know what he said, but from my knowledge, his version is, she’s really young and then she’s older.”
Casting hasn’t been officially confirmed for Crowe’s film, though Meryl Streep has been reported to be in talks to play an older version of the singer. The speculation appeared to be later confirmed by record executive Clive Davis.
Meanwhile, Anya Taylor-Joy has also been linked to the project, and went viral earlier this year after she was asked a bizarre question comparing Mitchell to her Super Mario Galaxy Movie character Princess Peach.