‘Long Bright River’: Amanda Seyfried, Liz Moore on adapting the book

NEW YORK — Amanda Seyfried’s face contorts into a grimace.

I had just asked Liz Moore, the author of “Long Bright River,” the novel on which Seyfried’s new show is based, about what it’s like to have an actor bring to life a character whose first-person voice she had in her head for so long.

Seyfried makes an almost cartoonish expression with her big eyes and expressive mouth, which have been tools for her in everything from “Mean Girls” to “The Dropout.” What’s that about?

“I just don’t think we could ever make what was in your head exist,” she says to Moore, sitting next to her in a New York hotel room. “What exists in your imagination is what makes you such a great writer. So I’m like, I don’t know if anyone could do it justice.”

“That’s so funny,” Moore responds. “I’m so moved by what you brought to the role and it’s very different than what I wrote but that’s a good thing.”

For Seyfried, the Peacock limited series, premiering Thursday, offered a rare opportunity to play a character adapted from a book while working closely alongside its author. Moore, who co-created the series with showrunner Nikki Toscano, brought with her a wealth of knowledge, not just about the interior life of Seyfried’s Mickey, a Philadelphia cop, but also the world she occupies. “Long Bright River” is set in Kensington, a neighborhood of the city known for being a hub of the opioid epidemic, and a place where Moore has both researched and volunteered for years now.

“I just felt if you were happy, then we were doing it right,” says Seyfried, who’s also an executive producer. “To not have the barometer of you would have been a lot more challenging.”

“Long Bright River” follows Mickey, who comes across a mystery that hits close to home. Her sister Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings), an addict who spent time as a sex worker, is missing just as a number of other women like her are found dead. As Mickey, an unlikely (and sometimes not very adept) officer, hunts down the killer she also looks for her sister, leading her to grapple with her own role in the community as someone who also feels like an outsider.

The show follows the same general contours of the novel. The story sprang out of Moore’s attachment to Kensington, which she first visited in 2009 shortly after she moved to the region. She had been assigned to write the accompanying text for a photo essay about the neighborhood, and got “very nerdy” about its history.

“I also felt very moved just by being in conversation with a lot of the people who were there experiencing addiction and in some cases doing sex work to support their substance use disorder,” she says. “And I have a very long family history of addiction so I also felt personally tied to the community in a kind of intangible way and I ended up returning to the neighborhood over and over to do volunteer work.” That work included leading community writing workshops at a women’s day shelter.

Moore never considered that “Long Bright River,” which ended up on Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2020 list, would become a series when writing — that idea, she says, would be the “death of my fiction.” For the television adaptation, she was paired with Toscano, whose previous credits include the Prime Video series “Hunters.”

After the two of them had written the first three episodes, they offered the lead role to Seyfried.

“I think there’s just something really sort of raw about her and vulnerable in a unique way that we thought would service the character of Mickey,” Toscano explains in a separate interview.

Seyfried listened to the book — “I can’t read and crochet at the same time,” she says — and found that it fulfilled a specific long-held desire of hers: She really wanted to play a cop.

“It’s a literal uniform and I didn’t know what it felt like,” she says. “As a kid I was always in awe of cops and firefighters and service people and I always saw them as heroes even though 1741874381 it’s very, very murky.” Also, she notes that her friend Jennifer Carpenter, star of “Dexter,” always plays cops; Seyfried wanted a go.

Seyfried, wearing a pink blazer and wrapping her combat boot-clad feet around each other under her chair, explains she typically looks for the differences between herself and the characters she would play. Mickey, she says, was confrontational in a way she wouldn’t be. But there was also a personal pull toward the story. Seyfried grew up in Allentown, Pa., and, like Mickey and Moore, comes from a family in which she was surrounded by addiction.

“I think there’s a certain mode that Mickey and I can tap into, not to completely ignore the reality but to separate from the reality,” she says. “When you can perfectly relate to something, it makes that whole aspect of the character done.” Mickey, she adds, was almost like a friend.

Seyfried and Moore shared with each other the specifics of how they experienced addiction secondhand. But Moore is also delicate in how she positions herself when telling these narratives.

“I think both of us are careful to understand because we are the loved one of people with addiction; I’ll speak for myself, I shouldn’t be the one telling their story, but I can speak to what it’s like to grow up knowing what addiction is from birth,” she says.

Similarly, both she and Seyfried are outsiders to Kensington. Despite growing up nearby, Seyfried had never heard of it before “Long Bright River.”

A little over a year ago, Seyfried, Moore and Toscano took a research trip to Philadelphia and visited Kensington, where they met with community leaders including Father Michael Duffy of St. Francis Inn, a food service organization where Moore taught a writing workshop, and Johanna Berrigan and Mary Beth Appel of the free clinic the Catholic Worker. (The show was largely shot in New York, though they brought in Kensington-based graffiti artists to tag the set.)

Moore explains that during the visit she recognized that while she has affection for the vibrancy of the Kensington community, she also knows that to see the sadness that exists on its streets for the first time can be shocking.

“I needed to leave room for everybody to have their own natural reaction for a place that I love very much but that can be jarring to see for the first time,” she says.

Seyfried found the experience “surreal” to see people under the influence on Kensington Avenue.

“I had read the scripts and had listened to the book and I had all this information, but it wasn’t until then that I was finally there and it grounded me in a way that obviously needed to be grounded,” she says. “It’s tricky to tell a story like this. You don’t want to hurt anybody but you also want people to know so they can have compassion and so they can support and respect as opposed to try to fix.”

Seyfried was battling a stomach bug that she thinks she picked up from being around cows while filming a teaser to persuade financiers to fund “Ann Lee,” the latest project from “The Brutalist” creators Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet. (Seyfried, who lives on a farm, notes these cows were not hers; she stars in the musical drama, directed by Fastvold, which wrapped production at the end of last year.) Still, after her Prilosec kicked in, she went on a ride-along with a local female officer. “I was thinking, oh, this is kind of boring and then the day turned pretty quickly,” she says.

As a petite woman, Seyfried had conversations with her hosts on how to leverage her size in the job. It resulted in playing Mickey with a stance that operates like an invisible shield. That was new for Moore.

“One thing that Amanda brought to the role that I didn’t foresee, but immediately it struck me that the minute you put a camera on somebody, you play the role with a certain kind of toughness that I don’t think existed on the page,” Moore says, focusing on Seyfried midsentence. “It is absolutely necessary after having seen the physical stuff that she’s asked to do as Mickey, there’s more of an external shell.”

Mickey was tough for Seyfried to shake, and the end of the sometimes exhausting shoot where she was away from her kids and battling more stomach issues was surprisingly emotional. She realized she needed to let off steam in a way she rarely does.

“I cried at the wrap party,” she says. “I never go to wrap parties but I went to the wrap party. We closed down the wrap party and went to another party. We were so drunk.” Seyfried’s voice gets conspiratorially high-pitched. Moore interjects: “Nope, cut.”