Amanda Seyfried learned to play the 1971 album across the guitar, dulcimer, and piano while prepping to play Joni Mitchell in a since-shelved biopic

Amanda Seyfried said she felt like a “bona fide musician” after learning to play the entirety of Joni Mitchell’s masterpiece, Blue, while prepping for a since-shelved project about the iconic singer-songwriter. 

Seyfried was set to play Mitchell in a biopic about the singer and Elliot Roberts, Mitchell’s manager and co-founder of Asylum Records. (Roberts died in 2019.) During the pandemic, Seyfried said she learned to play the 1971 album across the guitar, dulcimer, and piano.   

“The day that I finished learning the last song on the album, ‘[The Last Time I Saw] Richard’, I fucking wept,” Seyfried told GQ in a new interview. “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.”

Over the course of preparing for the role, Seyfried said she met Mitchell at her home in Los Angeles, soaking up the folk icon’s stories. “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?’ … It’s perfect!”

Last year, Seyfried showcased some of what she learned while on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, playing “California” on the dulcimer. “The reason it was so viral was because it wasn’t meant to be,” Seyfried told GQ. “And because it was happy.”

Although the Mitchell biopic Seyfried was attached to has since been shelved, director Cameron Crowe is behind another project, in which Meryl Streep is slated to star as Mitchell in the later years of her life.  

Details about the film have been kept under tight wraps, but Seyfried said she was aware of people reaching out to Crowe, asking “‘What the fuck are you doing, dude?’” “I don’t know what he said, but from my knowledge, his version is, she’s really young and then she’s older,” Seyfried said.