Amy Seimetz never fully turns off her directing brain while acting. “My goal as an actor is always to not get cut out of the television show,” she says with a laugh. “A lot of things that are really helpful for me, in line delivery, are more technical on the filmmaking side: What are you cutting to next? Where are you playing this out? Is this a closeup? Wide? How are you editing this?” The approach has nothing to do with maximizing screentime or superseding her actual director, but modulating her performance within a broader context. “These questions can sound like I’m overstepping, but I actually am aware as an actor, ‘Oh, if I look over here, they can cut to this to help them out in some capacity.’”
This yields rich rewards in The Testaments, Hulu’s upcoming sequel series set 15 years after the end of The Handmaid’s Tale (premiering April 8), and featuring Ann Dowd reprising her Emmy-winning turn as Aunt Lydia. Seimetz portrays Paula, the obsessive matriarch grudgingly raising Agnes (Chase Infiniti), which is the Gilead name for Hannah, the now-teenaged daughter of Handmaid’s protagonist June (Elisabeth Moss). With imposing, sometimes comic intensity, Seimetz captures the anxieties of a woman on the verge of unraveling whenever life seems out of order — even the misplacement of a dish.
“She wants everything pretty, she wants everything perfect — and so anything that’s out of place, that’s where my eye goes,” she says. “It is very rare to get the opportunity to play someone so sort of insidiously bad. But I didn’t want to go for the arch-villain archetype.”
The performance ought to bring Seimetz some attention, a reminder of the piercing perceptiveness she’s brought to projects including the acclaimed film Upstream Color and her own directorial project, The Girlfriend Experience. Already, she’s up for an honor at the forthcoming SeriesMania. The indie darling, who’d steadily grown her hybrid acting-directing career in the 2010s, has been out of public view for the last few years. Part of this has to do with a shift in priorities — “It’s very rare that I act these days,” she says — and part of it has to do with swift larger industry shifts, the long-gestating nature of getting anything off the ground right now. And of course, there was the frenzy surrounding The Idol — the HBO series co-created by Sam Levinson, Reza Fahim and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye that Seimetz had directed nearly a whole season of, only for her version to be ultimately, shockingly scrapped for an entirely new take (more on that shortly).
So why was The Testaments the project to lead to her largest acting role — and, presumably, press circuit — in years? Indeed, she went so far as to audition for it. “It has to be something where I’m like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this, this is maybe not in my wheelhouse’ — if I look at it and I go, ‘I’ve never done that before,’ then I know I want to try,” she says. “They all sort of feed each other in a way — directing, writing, and acting. When I get tired of being bossy, I crave having people tell me when to hit a mark and what to say. When I get tired of being told where to hit a mark and what to say, I want to be bossy again.”
Seimetz came into the project a huge Margaret Atwood fan — the show is based on Atwood’s novel of the same name, which was written during The Handmaid’s Tale’s run on Hulu and builds off of the original series’ events as much as her original book — and with connections to Infiniti, her main co-star. “My very good friend is Sara Murphy, so we had mutual friends — there was an easy in,” she says, referring to the Oscar-winning producer of One Battle After Another, which featured Infiniti’s breakout role.
Seimetz’s icy chemistry with Infiniti is instantaneous and surprisingly light on its feet, reflective of the show as a whole despite the heavy themes. “I wouldn’t say I was playing for comedy, even though Chase would probably argue that I was,” Seimetz says. “But the idea that this is allowed to be devilishly funny in a very, very dark — almost too-close-to-reality — universe pushed me really hard to make it so, because I knew that my character was being told through the lens of Chase’s character.”
“I would try to push as far as I possibly could,” Seimetz adds, “and then just trust the director to pull me back a little bit.”
Amy Seimetz in ‘The Testaments’
Disney/Russ Martin
***
Three years ago, Seimetz was traveling around New Zealand’s South Island with a friend, on break from filming her most recent acting role in Netflix’s Sweet Tooth, when she got a call from her publicist: Rolling Stone was asking for comment on “whatever chaos they were writing about” regarding The Idol. She lost signal; her friend asked whether they should turn back or continue on with their off-the-grid adventure. “I was like, ‘No, I want to do what we planned and go snorkeling with dolphins’ — and by the way, that was the best fucking decision I’ve ever made,” Seimetz says.
She brings this up first to reiterate she still has no comment on what went down on that set or what happened to the show — which was critically derided — once she had been replaced (Levinson directed the final product). Rolling Stone reported that Seimetz was “set up to fail” and that she exited a “shitshow”; HBO later told The Hollywood Reporter in a statement that her version “did not meet HBO standards so we chose to make a change.”
“It doesn’t serve me to dwell on it, it doesn’t serve me to really comment on it,” Seimetz says. “If anything, it is great that I don’t feel the need to — and I really, truly don’t.” She pauses, then connects her Idol saga to the biggest project she’s taken on since: “The best I could say is a Handmaid’s quote: ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’ I’m only half joking.”
Did Seimetz feel discouraged, though, coming out of an experience we can at minimum call not ideal? “It doesn’t really matter how I felt,” she says twice. “This is Hollywood. [Steven] Soderbergh actually said this to me: ‘You’re not a real filmmaker until you have that notch on your belt and you keep going.’” For the record, Seimetz looks back fondly on The Idol that she made, even though it’ll never see the light of day. “I really, really loved what I was doing, and they ended up making the show they wanted to make, but that’s just the way it goes,” she says. “I loved working with Lily [Rose Depp]. I think she’s brilliant. At least with the work that we were doing together, she’s a comedic genius, next-level — I don’t know if people know that.”
Behind the scenes, Seimetz forged ahead with vigor, helming multiple episodes of the acclaimed Mr. & Mrs. Smith series adaptation out of the gate. She’s now got multiple high-profile projects in the works as a writer-director, which she’s reasonably confident will move forward — even if they take years. She’s also shooting a hybrid documentary on a rolling basis with one of her best friends, Jillian Mayer, down in Florida. “Jillian’s from Miami and I’m from Tampa, and so whenever I go home, I drive down and reshoot these little pieces of it,” she says. The dynamic has echoed the making of She Dies Tomorrow, Seimetz’s electric 2020 horror-thriller.
“I really fell in love with that process, which is: Start some ideas, and you don’t necessarily need to know where it’s going,” Seimetz says. “Once I realized that I don’t have to wait around for a big project to be there or for anyone to tell me I can direct something…I just went ahead and bought cameras, and now shoot pieces of things.”
She’s learned to navigate a rapidly changing industry through the example of Soderbergh, who first asked Seimetz to turn his feature The Girlfriend Experience into a series a little over a decade ago — even though they’d never spoken beforehand. “He’s so savvy about the changing landscape…. He really saw an opportunity when TV was starting to drop binge-watching: He went to Starz and he was like, ‘What is the number at which you would make a television show and leave us alone?’” Seimetz says. “They gave him a number, and it was very low, and then we made it.” The first season starred Riley Keough in a breakout turn and drew wide critical acclaim, going on to run two more seasons in an anthology format.
“I’ve tried that tactic again on multiple things,” Seimetz says now of how Soderbergh pushed their auteur-driven drama through. “But it is just a forever-changing landscape.” Again though, she sees Soderbergh’s prolific slate over the last five years — even as, for many, it’s felt like getting anything made is harder than ever — and takes inspiration from the nimbleness. “Everyone’s scared to make things,” she says before paraphrasing him: “I’m just going to figure out a way that I can make a bunch of these.”
Amy Seimetz at the ‘Pet Sematary’ premiere at SXSW in 2019
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for SXSW
***
Taking on her first regular TV role since the pandemic, Seimetz wound up away from home in Toronto for six full months last year, echoing her intensive time making The Girlfriend Experience up in Canada a decade earlier. The main difference is that here, she was playing a supporting role in an expansive storytelling tapestry. She did not direct on The Testaments either — “I am not able to really be in a performance while directing; I know that about myself enough to say ‘No, thank you’” — and thus had many days to herself.
“It’s almost like a meditation of being in that person because you’ll have breaks and you’re like, ‘What would this person do?’” Seimetz says. “And I can’t say that I relate to Paula.”
She does relate to Atwood, however — she speaks of the author as in sync with her own philosophy of filmmaking and storytelling. “Under these dire circumstances, yes, there are heroes, and yes, there are people that are oppressed, but she allows the emotions to be really messy,” Seimetz says. “She allows the heroes to make mistakes and gets into the psychology and the decision making of what happens under these circumstances. And she plays in this world of gothic darkness with a wicked sense of humor.”
Seimetz then turns to how The Testaments came about in the first place: Atwood seized an opportunity, expanding upon her groundbreaking book right as the Handmaid’s adaptation hit a fever pitch of popularity. Seimetz clearly admires artists’ ability to find their moment. “She’s another one that’s extremely adaptable to the way that the world works,” she says. Seimetz can count herself among that group, too.
