Amanda Seyfried didn't just prepare for her role as Joni Mitchell—she became a musician. The actress learned to play the entirety of Mitchell's 1971 masterpiece Blue on guitar, dulcimer, and piano while prepping for a biopic about the folk legend and her manager Elliot Roberts that's since been shelved.
And it moved her to tears. "The day that I finished learning the last song on the album, '[The Last Time I Saw] Richard', I fucking wept," Seyfried told GQ. "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."
The prep work went deep. During the pandemic, Seyfried met Mitchell at her Los Angeles home, where the icon herself walked her through the album's sparse architecture. "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!'"
That dedication paid off when Seyfried appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and played "California" on the dulcimer. The clip went viral—and Seyfried knows exactly why. "The reason it was so viral was because it wasn't meant to be," she told GQ. "And because it was happy."
The biopic never materialized, but Seyfried's reverence for Mitchell's work was genuine. Months of mastering one of the greatest albums ever made, and tears on the final track, earned her the title she claimed.
