For seven years, different movie scripts about the Deep Throat actress Linda Lovelace circulated in Hollywood. Lindsay Lohan, Anna Faris, Olivia Wilde and Kate Hudson were all interested in the role at various times but all either pulled out, concerned about the nudity and brutality, or were dropped, leading to whispers that the project was cursed.

Some agents reportedly wouldn’t even show the scripts to their clients for fear they would accept the role and it would damage their careers.

But Amanda Seyfried, the perky American blonde who found fame as the star-struck Sophie in the film version of Mamma Mia!, has gone where others feared to tread: for three months she filmed Lovelace, immersing herself totally in the tragically troubled life of the actress who became the world’s first erotic superstar after famously starring in Deep Throat, the 1972 hardcore porn film that broke box-office records and became a cultural sensation.

When I talked with 26-year-old Seyfried a week after she wrapped her final scene, she was still recovering from her walk on the dark side and was, she says, “detoxing”. Talk of a curse doesn’t bother her, although she says: “I’m in a daze. It’s weird. It was a really challenging role and I don’t know how it’s going to go for me. It’s the first time I’ve ever had to play a real-life character and I took the experience home with me every night. It’s a really troubled story and I’m still getting over it.”

She is wearing a grey leather jacket and her shoulder-length hair is back to its natural blonde after going dark for the film. With her cherubic smile, Seyfried is not the first actress who springs to mind to portray Linda Lovelace, who lived a life of abuse and trauma. The porn star claimed in one of her autobiographies that her marriage to Chuck Traynor had been plagued by violence, rape, forced prostitution and private pornography. Following Deep Throat, she made two more movies and then denounced her pornography career, claiming she had been forced into it by Traynor (portrayed in the movie by Peter Sarsgaard) and for a while became a spokeswoman for the anti-pornography movement. She died, aged 53, in 2002 from car crash injuries.

Lovelace also features Adam Brody as Lovelace’s Deep Throat co-star Harry Reems, Sarah Jessica Parker as Gloria Steinem and James Franco as Hugh Hefner. To prepare for her role, Seyfried read Lovelace’s autobiographies, watched her movies and talked to people in the pornography industry.

“It’s a huge responsibility to be the voice of somebody else, and it was very difficult because what she had to go through was so dark,” she says. “She was physically, verbally and sexually abused and it made for a very strange dynamic between her and her husband, who was also her captor. Her life was ruined by what happened to her.

“There was so much material available to me, which made it less daunting, but it’s definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

Amanda Seyfried’s career has been on a sharp upward curve ever since Mamma Mia! She has a thriller, Gone, due out shortly, in which she plays a girl who sets out to find the serial killer who has kidnapped her sister; and next month she goes to New Orleans to join up with Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe for the film version of Les Misérables, in which she plays Cosette.

“I was playing Cosette in recitals when I was 15, because I used to sing classical music, and now I’m actually going to play her – it’s a dream for me,” she says. “Getting back into singing has been tough, but awesome, too, because I haven’t lost what I had when I was 15; it’s only got better, so that’s a plus.

“It’s so different going from Linda Lovelace, a porn-star-turned-feminist with a New York accent, to an 18-year-old Englishwoman – well, French actually, but I’ll be doing an English accent – so it’s going to be hard.”

After Mamma Mia!, Seyfried became deeply involved with her British co-star Dominic Cooper. He ended his 12-year relationship with girlfriend Joanna Carocan and she broke up with actor Micah Alberti so they could be together.

But their romance foundered after two years. “I got my heart broken pretty hard,” she says. “It changes you a little bit every time you either break someone’s heart or get your heart broken.”

Seyfried began her acting career at the age of nine in her home town of Allentown, Pennsylvania, and modelled from the age of 11 until she was 17, at the same time taking voice lessons, studying opera and training with a Broadway coach.

The following year she moved to Los Angeles and landed a recurring role in the soap opera All My Children and then made her movie debut in Mean Girls alongside Lindsay Lohan. When she is not on location, she lives in West Hollywood in a house she shares with her older sister Jennifer, a rock musician.

“It’s nice to have her around,” says Amanda. “I’ve gone all over the world and got to travel and do these extraordinary things, but I’m still coming home to my sister and her cat and my dog every day.”

Another film about Linda Lovelace, called Inferno, is about to go into production with Malin Akerman as Lovelace and Matt Dillon as Traynor, so she knows that the success or failure of Lovelace lies with her performance.

“The responsibility is huge, but I feel this is the beginning of something else and a new direction for me,” she says.

‘Gone’ opens on April 20. ‘Lovelace’ is out later this year

AMANDA Seyfried hated dressing like Linda Lovelace in her new porn star movie.

The Mamma Mia star will soon be seen as late activist and former porn star Lovelace in biopic and the role was not without it’s tricky moments.

“To be honest the nude scenes were okay because there is so much going on it’s not like anyone is going to notice,” says Amanda.

“But the costumes were something else. There was a lot of camel toe! Other than that the whole Seventies look was great.”

Seyfried was recently asked if she’s going through a 20s promiscuous phase.

“No! I’m terrified of being promiscuous. I don’t like the feeling you get when it’s not something that you truly want to do, and I hate the emotional abuse you give yourself afterward,” she said.

“It’s just uncomfortable when you’re with somebody and you’re like, ‘I don’t really know if I’m even comfortable with this. Why did I? Eww!’ I think dating can come without sex. I think that’s a really fun way to do it. Right now I’m happy to not have someone’s naked body around me. Except for my dog’s.

“I think about kids all the time. I feel like the next person I commit to, that’s going to be the guy who I’m going to have kids with. That’s in my crazy female brain. So that’s why I’m like, ‘I can’t commit.’”

Amanda Seyfried apparently skipped class on the day that they were teaching young movie stars how to sidestep the media.

If she had attended that class in “Promoting Movies 101,” she would have learned how to stay on point, and not let the interviewer get her talking about other projects. The idea is to talk only about the current movie, even if the next movie might be the one that intrigues the interviewer.

Seyfried, 26, is a free spirit who doesn’t know how to deflect or deceive the media. If you want to talk about her new movie “Gone,” which opens Friday, that’s fine. And if you also want to talk about her controversial role in “Lovelace,” in which she portrays the late porn star Linda Lovelace of “Deep Throat” fame, that’s fine, too. “Lovelace,” which will be released later this year, is one of four films the actress has coming out in 2012. She also has a supporting role in the ensemble film “The Big Wedding,” and a starring role in “Les Misérables.”

This is the same Amanda Seyfried who first gained noticed in the Tina Fey-penned film “Mean Girls,” and then shot to stardom as the young bride in “Mamma Mia!” When you’re in a movie that makes $600 million, many romantic roles will follow, and Seyfried appeared in several, including “Dear John” and “Letters to Juliet.”

But she wants a more diverse career, and “Lovelace” is obviously a step in that direction. But so is “Gone,” in which she plays a woman stalking a serial killer who has abducted her sister. She believes it is the same predator who abducted her the year before, but police doubt her original claim, and are slow to act on her sister’s disappearance.

Seyfried talks about her upcoming movies, and how they fit into her career plan. Then she unexpectedly unburdened herself on the burdens of stardom. She is getting to the point in her skyrocketing career that she is expected to sell movies on her name alone, and she’s not sure she wants that responsibility.

ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER: The last time we spoke, you were very candid about your career. You said what you needed after all those romantic roles was a good psycho killer movie. Is this it?

AMANDA SEYFRIED: Actually, I wanted to play a psycho killer, and I still do.

Q. Even though you’re only chasing a psycho killer in “Gone,” is this the movie you were looking for to send your career in another direction?

A. I don’t think so. It’s still hard for people in Hollywood to buy me as a psycho killer. “Chloe” hit it closer than anything else I’ve done, but I’m still not there. “Gone” is good, though, because while I start out as a victim, I get stronger and show that you can do anything you put your mind to. That’s what I love about this film. There’s nothing too far-fetched about it. She’s not flying off bridges or anything like that. It’s based in reality. It’s a normal girl in extraordinary situations.

Read Full Interview >>

With the recent rash of revenge flicks comes heroine-driven thriller Gone, starring Amanda Seyfried. The young actress has starred in a number of films in her career that so far defies type-casting. She stole scenes as a wide-eyed and gorgeous idiot in Tina Fey’s Mean Girls, showed off her singing chops alongside Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia!, and recently starred in the dystopian sci-fi thriller In Time. In Gone, Seyfried plays a traumatized kidnapping surviver who believes her younger sister has been taken by the very same serial killer she escaped. The ingenue spoke with Buzzine’s Emmanuel Itier about what drew her to this film, the physicality of shooting a break-neck thriller, and her next film, the racy biography of ’70s porn star Linda Lovelace.

Emmanuel Itier: Tell me what attracted you to Gone? Was it to work with a Brazilian young director?

Amanda Seyfried: That was one of them. I saw Adrift after I read the script, and it’s really flawless, so I thought if he could bring that emotional intensity that he had in Adrift to a really smart psychological thriller, it would be a really good collaboration. The script was really fun. I like this genre. This is the kind of movie that I would go see. It’s scary, in the best way, and it’s a smart movie, so you get to really kind of think a little bit while you’re watching it. It’s like putting together a puzzle for two hours. And the pace is right there. It takes you to the edge of your seat, and then it’s very satisfying at the end. So it’s good. It’s just my kind of movie. I’m glad I finally got to do something like this.

EI: Are you that type of girl – the bad-ass, kick-*ss girl that takes her destiny in her hands? Did you put a little bit of yourself in it?

AS: I didn’t really put myself in it. She was loosely based on my sister, at the beginning, and then when stuff really gets going and her sister is gone, I just went off into this other character who is just fearless, because I have never had to deal with a situation where I had nothing to lose like on this level, so I channeled Ashley Judd a little bit.

Read more >>

You just wrapped a biopic where you play the late porn star Linda Lovelace. If you’re Amanda Seyfried, what’s next?

You don’t go to Disneyland.

You go home to the house outside Los Angeles that you share with your sister. And you live a very real life.

“I got home three days ago and my sister said, ‘Hey Amanda, there are dishes and your laundry. Your dog just ate the kitty liter. Will you please clean up your dog vomit?’ We do get testy with each other.”

Seyfried, who stars in three major films this year, isn’t exactly living like a major film star. “You’re right. I tell my sister I’m a big star and she says, ‘That’s nice, Amanda. Go clean up after the cat.’ ”

In “Gone” (opening Friday), Seyfried plays a young woman named Jill whose sister disappears. She is sure that a serial killer who kidnapped her two years ago has returned and decides to turn the table on him.

With “Lovelace” behind her, soon she will film “Les Miserables,” where nabbed the coveted role of Cosette.

1 You’re not known for doing thrillers like “Gone.” Was that the appeal?

Thrillers are actually my favorite genre. This particular film was a bit daunting because I’m in a lot of the scenes alone, which is a lot of responsibility. If this is a bomb, this is my responsibility. But I can’t focus on box office. I have to care about making good movies that entertain. This film is a puzzle and you’re constantly trying to figure out the twists and turns. It’s such a fun ride.

2 How do you keep up the suspense in a film where you have to look afraid all of the time?

It’s tough to keep up that level of suspense in your acting. Sometimes to keep my energy up, I would just run in place before the really scary scenes. I’d run until I was out of breath. But that’s not enough. The emotion has to be there. It has to live inside of you. What helped here is this is a movie where my sister disappears. I live with my sister now, so it was cool that I could tap into my feelings for my real sister. I kept thinking, “What if my sister was kidnapped?” I know that I’d stop at nothing to find her.”

3 Why did you want to play Linda Lovelace?

I don’t think people know the real woman. People have an idea in their minds because she was a porn star. It’s a very narrow-minded idea. The truth is Linda had the most unbelievable traumatic experiences in life. She left her parents and had a child when she was 17. Her mom made her give up that child. Linda ran right into the arms of a monster and couldn’t escape. The nightmare didn’t end until she died. It’s an extreme story, but it’s real. That’s why there were so many people clamoring to make the movie. Linda finally found her voice, but it was too late. She did do a lot for equality.

4 Do you have an issue being naked on screen?

Nudity for me is not an issue. It doesn’t scare me at all. I wouldn’t ever do full frontal in a film — I’m not that comfortable! The truth is I’m still developing my feelings on nudity and films. But it wasn’t an issue for me when playing Linda Lovelace. There are some scenes of simulated sex, but we’re not actually re-enacting the actual deep throat scenes. We are re-enacting scenes from “Deep Throat,” but not that actual act. I didn’t think that was necessary at all.

5 What was the appeal of doing “Les Miz” on screen?

I was dying to do “Les Miz!” I talked to the director, and then four months passed. No one told me anything, so I thought, “I guess I don’t have it.” Then I got the call and I was over the moon. I can’t believe I got this role. It really has come full circle for me. I was 10 or 11 when I saw ‘Les Miz’ for the first time in Philly. I was one of those girls singing Cosette when I was 15. Now, I’m playing her at 26. The thrill for me is I get to sing again in a movie. I’m really, truly so grateful. But my poor sister. I’m going to clean up after the cat later and sing the entire soundtrack.

After Demi Moore had to drop out of “Lovelace” last month, there were many rumors about who would replace her as Gloria Steinem in the biopic about porn star Linda Lovelace. The production finally settled on Sarah Jessica Parker, who agreed to cameo in the film following a personal plea from star Amanda Seyfried.

“One day, I was like, ‘Listen, what can I do? You keep throwing around names, but who do we really want?’” Seyfried told Moviefone while promoting her new film, “Gone,” which hits theaters on Feb. 24. “They were like, ‘Sarah Jessica Parker.’ I was like ‘Yes, please. Where is she? What is she doing?’ So I called her agent, whom I’ve never met and asked, ‘What can we do to get her involved? We have three days. We need her.’ And I emailed her that day and she was on a plane three days later. And she was incredible. She’s so good. I’m so grateful that she came in. I wish she’d been there for longer.”

Despite her happiness that Parker was able to play the venerable Ms. magazine co-founder, Seyfried was saddened by Moore’s departure.

“It was a really hard situation because Demi had worked really hard and she was so prepared and so ready and nobody expected her to not be able to do it — she didn’t either. I knew she wanted to do it, but she knew she had to take care of herself. It’s hard when you’re pulling for someone, but they can’t do it and you have to substitute them. We needed Gloria Steinem in this movie, she was a huge part of Linda’s life and such a huge icon.”

Seyfried said that Parker is “amazing” in “Lovelace,” which also features a cameo from James Franco as Hugh Hefner.

“He came, just in and out in one day. He’s really good at embodying different people. He’s certainly a character actor in my opinion. I remember him sitting in the trailer and just listening on the headphones to Hef talking. He’s really good at mimicking things and it’s really important when you come in for just one day and just whip it out. It’s really impressive.”

Whip it out?

“He didn’t actually… oh wait, yes, Hef… no pun intended. There was some whipping,” she laughed.

Check back to Moviefone next week for more from Seyfried on “Gone” and getting her father’s approval for “Lovelace.”

Hands down this has to be one of those most hilarious videos I have ever seen of Amanda Seyfried. Amanda and Justin are hysterical together!

Amanda Seyfried sat down with Diablo Cody in the “Red Band Trailer” to talk about Mean Girls, Jennifer’s Body, her music and much more. Enjoy the video and 288 screen captures!

• Screen Captures > Screen Captures 2011 > Red Band Trailer Interview