Amanda Seyfried names the greatest acting performance she’s ever seen: “It’s a masterclass”
Hollywood tells a lot of lies, but one of the most annoying is when someone puts glasses and tan lipstick on one of the most gorgeous women on the face of the Earth and announces that she is ugly.
Amanda Seyfried was subjected to this category of deceit in the 2009 comedy Jennifer’s Body, and some of us are still pissed off about it. Another common and contradictory lie is that people who look like Seyfried (blonde, classically beautiful, with a CV that includes soap operas) can’t be serious actors. Luckily, she’s dispelled both falsehoods pretty thoroughly in recent years.
Take, for example, her Academy Award-nominated portrayal of Marion Davies in 2020’s Mank, or her completely outside-the-box portrayal of the founding member of the Shaker movement in Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee in 2025. Seyfried seems pretty fearless in front of the camera, and her increasingly varied filmography is proof.
There are plenty of actors who might be seen as the inspiration behind her career. There is no shortage of female Hollywood stars who have sidestepped expectations and typecasting to demonstrate their theatrical range, and her background in daytime TV and theatre is hardly unique. But the actor who awes her the most will probably come as a surprise, because they are none of these things.
In a 2022 interview with Backstage, Seyfried revealed that her lodestar in the industry is none other than Thomas Haden Church. Yes, the character actor who brought you Sandman in the Spider-Man movies and Lyle van Groot in George of the Jungle, is the standard to which the Mamma Mia star holds herself. As it turns out, it’s one specific performance that inspires her – his early work as Lowell Mather in the 1990s sitcom Wings.
“He’s able to play idiotic yet truthful, and relatable and hilarious,” she explained, adding, “I just think it’s a master class… Playing characters like that is just so satisfying and harder than it seems. He’s so consistently present.” Seyfried knows this better than anyone and said that she used his performance in the show as a reference when preparing for her role in Mean Girls.
Although it isn’t as beloved these days as Friends or Seinfeld, Wings had a highly successful run between 1990 and 1997. It even beat Fresh Prince of Bel Air and The Simpsons in the Nielsen ratings for some of its tenure.
As its name suggests, it takes place in an airport, specifically a small one in Nantucket, where Haden Church’s character is a lovable dullard who works as a mechanic at the airport, and, as is so often the case with characters in long-running sitcoms, he undergoes a pretty wild evolution, even winding up in the Witness Protection Program at one point.
His ability to combine cognitive minimalism with believable acting is something that Seyfried believes every actor should watch and learn from. He never received any accolades for it, but some might say that a compliment from a peer is just as rewarding as an actual Oscar. They would be lying, but again, that’s just part of the Hollywood game.
