Amanda Seyfried Interview For Catherine Hardwicke’s ‘Red Riding Hood’

In Catherine Hardwicke’s fairy tale re-imagining ‘Red Riding Hood,’ Amanda Seyfried stars as Valerie, the girl in the iconic red cloak who’s stalked by a werewolf.  Thrown in to confuse the matter she’s a beautiful young woman torn between two men, the brooding outsider, Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), and the man whom her parents have arranged for her to marry – the wealthy Henry (Max Irons). ‘Red Riding Hood’ comes to cinemas March 11th in the US, and April 15th in the UK. Check out what Amanda Seyfried had to say about the film below.

What was you initial reaction to Catherine’s vision?

Amanda Seyfried:  I resisted a little bit at the beginning because I thought, first of all the responsibility of playing such an iconic character was a bit stressful, and thinking how is this going to work? What is the script like? What are they gonna do with all the elements they could use? Then I read the script and I was like ‘’oh my god, I have no idea who the wolf is, this is genius.’’ then I met up with Catherine and she had all these visuals, these drawings, photos, cut-outs and videos, it just seemed so obvious to me.

What was your first reaction when seeing yourself in the iconic red cloak?

Amanda Seyfried: I thought, boy my nose looks big (Laughs). It was cool though, it was so beautiful, there’s so many different colours and things going on in the cape, it was worked on for months.

It was kind of a big deal when the cape came onto the set because it’s its own character, because it’s the most iconic piece of the story. Then after a while it wasn’t really a big deal. I just got sick of it because it’s really heavy. It was so beautifully designed. It took a lot of time to make that cape really beautiful.

Gary Oldman said working with you was a riot, what was he like?

Amanda Seyfried: He’s the funniest person I’ve ever worked with, we were doing a lot of action stuff, he was ridiculous, he would pretend there’s a wolf in front of us, and prank us. It was ludicrous at times….and tiring….but FUN, and the fact is we always had fun, no matter how tired we were, or lack of energy we had at that time of night shooting, it was always fun. He would be really serious, then he’d wear this extra moustache and he couldn’t laugh properly because of moustache, so the way he’d laugh was just one of my favourite memories. It warmed me.

How do you define your character?

Amanda Seyfried: I separated her from the usual damsel in distress – which is in most fairy tales, to somebody that’s completely not in distress at all. She’s this young, strong female that’s going through her life and realizing her sexuality and kind of trying to navigate herself through young adult life in this medieval village. That’s how I wanted to start playing it. Of course, she’s the heroine in the movie, it centres on her, so she needs to have balls. That was really attractive because I like playing women that have just no fear, especially in the circumstances, she’s pretty brave.

We added majorly contemporary elements to it, like a love triangle and the coming of age element to it. It’s very contemporary how she’s dealing with her parents and the man she loves and the man that she was betrothed to.