Amanda Seyfried has revealed how listening to Taylor Swift’s music helped her while filming Long Bright River.

The TV show, which premiered on Peacock on March 13, stars the actress as Mickey Fitzpatrick, a police officer and single mom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, investigating a string of murders in the rough Kensington neighborhood and working to catch a serial killer. The limited series, which spans eight episodes, is based on Liz Moore’s 2020 novel, which has the same title.

Long Bright River can be tough to watch at times as it examines life on the streets, as well as the opioid crisis, alcoholism, sexual grooming and corruption within the police. Amanda, 39, has now said that while filming the series, she decompressed by laughing and gossiping with her assistant in the car and the pair would sometimes “listen to Taylor Swift really loud” during the commute.

She told Variety, “My assistant and I would drive to work together and drive home together. I think we kind of laughed a lot and gossiped a lot to and from work. So when the hard shit happened, when I was playing all that emotional stuff, we just wouldn’t take it back in the car with us, subconsciously.

Amanda Seyfried at the premiere of Long Bright River in New York City on March 5 ( 
Image:
Getty Images)
“It’s not like we were like, ‘We shouldn’t talk about that. We’re going to talk about this.’ We would listen to Taylor Swift really loud some days because the commute is sometimes 90 minutes.”

While talking to People, Amanda said she “always wanted to play a cop” and landing her Long Bright River role was a dream for her. She said, “It’s like a childhood dream to play somebody that I just was always in awe of, even though it’s funny [because] I’m not good with authority.”

She said of her character, “This is a girl that has got a lot of issues, a lot of traumas. She’s a cop, she has a kid, she’s a single mother, and she’s flexing and trying to get by and she has all these responsibilities. It just seemed like it was chaos for her.”

Amanda added, “That’s attractive to me because it’s attractive to me to have a lot of balls in the air as a character…very specific parameters are really fun because it’s like a puzzle for me. I need a lot of guidance and a lot of information, and I like studying things and I just love going into worlds that I don’t know. For me, it’s the journey…I need to make sure that I’m not going to get bored while I’m away from my kids.”

Novelist Liz, who serves as an executive producer on the series alongside Amanda and showrunner Nikki Toscano, said Mickey’s character is quite complex. She shared, “One of the facets of her character is that she’s actually not that talented as a police officer. The police work does not come naturally to her. In some ways, I think she was meant to do something else, but the circumstances of her life have combined to make police work what she’s doing at this moment.”