Amanda Seyfried confirms she was due to play Joni Mitchell in a scrapped biopic
Amanda Seyfried has lifted the lid on her plans to star in a Joni Mitchell biopic that failed to materialise.
Last year, Seyfried impressed viewers of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon when she played the dulcimer to cover the classic Mitchell track, ‘California’, which racked up tens of millions of views across social media.
Subsequently, Seyfried distanced herself from portraying Mitchell on-screen, stating the Fallon appearance “was not an audition” and maintained “what I know about that project is that I’m very, very much aged-out of young Joni”.
However, now in a new interview with GQ, Seyfried explained that she was set to portray Mitchell and used the Covid-19 pandemic to learn the dulcimer in preparation for the role.
She shared, “It was a movie about her and [manager] Elliot Roberts. Then he died – but not before I met him.”
Additionally, Seyfried met with Mitchell at her home in Los Angeles, recalling, “I sat on the floor petting one of the dogs. She told me a lot of stories.”
They also bonded over listening to Mitchell’s seminal masterpiece Blue after Seyfried brought it up in conversation, revealing, “She’s like, ‘We’ll put on the album and light a fire’. After we listened to the album, she’s like, ‘It’s sparse, isn’t it’. It’s perfect!”
Seyfried elaborated on her preparation, “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.”
The film, starring Seyfried, failed to materialise, but Cameron Crowe is making a separate biopic on Mitchell, which is reportedly featuring Anna Taylor-Joy as a younger version of the singer-songwriter and Meryl Streep as an older version.
She said of Crowe’s film, “Apparently a lot of people reached out to Cameron Crowe and were like, ‘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.”
In an interview with The Guardian last October, Crowe provided an update on the movie, confirming, “We start next year. It’s Joni Mitchell’s story from her point of view, and it’s been a delight because her music is already so cinematic.”
In a previous interview with Ultimate Classic Rock in 2024, Crowe shared an insight into what to expect from his film on Mitchell’s life and career, saying, “You know, similarly to Heartbreakers Beach Party, it’s Joni’s life, not through anybody else’s prism. It’s through her prism. It’s the characters who impacted her life that you know and a lot that you don’t know. And the music is so cinematic.”
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