An A-List Actress Was Cut From Joni Mitchell Biopic After Learning To Play Entire ‘Blue’ Album

With projects like Mamma Mia! and Les Misérables under her belt, Amanda Seyfried has certainly established herself as a triple threat in Hollywood. A gifted singer, actress, and overall performer, Seyfried has moved fans time and time again, but there’s one project of hers that will never see the light of day.

In a June 15 interview with British GQ, the mom of two revealed that she was knee-deep in preparation to play Joni Mitchell in a biopic, when it all went down the drain.

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In the feature, Seyfried shared that she learned to play Mitchell’s Blue album on dulcimer, piano and guitar during the COVID-19 pandemic for the film. “It was a movie about her and [manager] Elliot Roberts,” she says. “Then he died – but not before I met him.”

In addition to Blue, Seyfried learned many of Mitchell’s classics, such as “The Circle Game” and “Both Sides Now.”

“The day that I finished learning the last song on the album, ‘[The Last Time I Saw] Richard,’ I f— wept,” Seyfried admitted. “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 f— mountain, I tell you.”

Amanda Seyfried at The 2026 Met Gala Celebrating “Costume Art” held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 04, 2026 in New York, New York.

Also, as part of her preparation, Seyfried got the opportunity to bond with Mitchell herself. While visiting the legendary singer at her house in Los Angeles, Seyfried got to know her as the two shared a steak dinner and listened to Blue.

“I sat on the floor petting one of the dogs,” Seyfried remembered. “She told me a lot of stories.”

“She’s like, ‘We’ll put on the album and light a fire,’” Seyfried said of their time together. “After we listened to the album, she’s like, ‘It’s sparse, isn’t it?’” Seyfried, of course, disagrees. “It’s perfect!” she responded.

Sadly, however, the project never came to fruition. Instead, Almost Famous director Cameron Crowe is working on his own Mitchell biopic with Anya Taylor-Joy and Meryl Streep reportedly slated to be younger and older versions of the singer.

“Apparently, a lot of people reached out to Cameron Crowe and were like, ‘What the fuck are you doing, dude?’” Seyfried said. “I don’t know what he said, but from my knowledge, his version is, she’s really young and then she’s older.”

Previously, Seyfried went viral for her rendition of Mitchell’s classic song “California” on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon in March 2025. “It was not an audition,” she clarified in the Just for Variety podcast. “In fact, I didn’t even consider that, which is funny. What I know about that project is that I’m very, very much aged-out of [playing] young Joni.”

Now knowing the full story, Seyfried’s performance was legitimately not an audition, but her scrapped biopic is a shame nonetheless.

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