The 1979 song Amanda Seyfried never wants to hear again: “It’s like a fever dream”
From Mean Girls and Jennifer’s Body to Les Misérables and First Reformed, Amanda Seyfried is arguably one of modern cinema’s most reliable and bankable stars. Having worked with big names like David Lynch and David Fincher, as well as taking on complex roles from Linda Lovelace to Ann Lee, you can’t deny the actor’s range.
Her musical skills have of course taken her to dramatic projects, her role as Cosette a notable standout, but then there’s Mamma Mia!, in which she got to perform many classic ABBA hits alongside the likes of Meryl Streep, Colin Firth, and Julie Walters. She poured her energy into singing and dancing covers of tracks like ‘Lay All Your Love on Me’, ‘Slipping Through My Fingers’, ‘I Have a Dream’, and, of course, ‘Voulez-Vous’, and it was a major hit.
The 1979 track was performed by all of the main cast members, with the scene featuring Seyfried’s Sophie panicking amid an intricately choreographed sequence full of party-goers, in which she interacts with all three of her potential fathers, unsure of who she is actually related to.
While many ABBA and Mamma Mia! fans love ‘Voulez-Vous’ – let’s be real, it’s one of their most fun, danceable tracks (and I don’t even like ABBA) – Seyfried would pay you if it meant never having to hear it ever again. That might seem a bit dramatic, but she has her reasons.
“What a nightmare scenario. That ‘Voulez-Vous’ song and this scene is just so traumatic because we spent so long learning this choreography,” she told Vanity Fair. It looked like a pretty tricky scene to execute, to be fair, with lots of sequin-clad dancers shimmying around, while Seyfried is required to have somewhat of a breakdown in the middle, not before conversing with each man, and her husband-to-be, amid the thump of the track and the gyrating bodies moving around her.
Not only did Seyfried tire of having to rehearse the scene so many times, but she also didn’t think she did a very good job. “I can fake being a good dancer. I didn’t in this, I was just bad,” she said, although you can’t help but feel as though she’s being a little hard on herself.
“This was just too much, it’s like the one ABBA song I just never wanna hear. This scene specifically is just very frantic… God, it’s like a fever dream,” Seyfried admitted. It’s a pivotal scene in the movie – first Pierce Brosnan comes over, adamant that he’s her father, then Colin Firth shimmies to Sophie, realising that it could be him, before she’s then met with Stellan Skarsgård.
I’m sure there’s a lot of other people (myself included), who would happily never listen to ABBA again, and it seems like Seyfried just got overloaded with a little too much of the Swedish Eurovision pop band during her time filming Mamma Mia! She wasn’t put off enough to come back for Mamma Mia!: Here We Go Again in 2018, however, although there was no ‘Voulez-Vous’ to be heard, much to Seyfried’s relief.
