The Housemaid’s Amanda Seyfried Shares Her Extremely Relatable Earliest Reading Memory

Amanda Seyfried is sharing her earliest memories of getting lost in a good book. 

While speaking to Reese Witherspoon during a Dec. 16 episode of her Bookmarked podcast, the 40-year-old actress revealed that she didn’t necessarily like reading until she was around 10 years old. 

“There were these Lois Duncan books,” Seyfried said of the I Know What You Did Last Summer author during a joint interview with the Housemaid director Paul Feig. “They were chapter books and I felt really adult when I was reading them, but they were thrillers, like crazy thrillers that I think I actually should make movies. But I remember just devouring them in a way that made me feel really empowered.”

Seyfried also revealed that her 8-year-old daughter Nina, whom she shares with husband Thomas Sadoski along with 5-year-old son Thomas, was similar in that she didn’t have a lot of interest in reading at an early age. 

“You’ve got to find something that you really enjoy and makes you feel safe,” the Mamma Mia actress emphasized. “I realized that with my daughter. I’m like, ‘She doesn’t want to read?’ No, she just has different tastes.”

For his part, Feig, 63, shared that his earliest memories of reading consisted of flipping through Winnie the Pooh as a little boy. 

“I had trouble reading, but for some reason, I was given that book by my grandma and I just devoured it,” he recalled. “The whole family was relieved, like, ‘Oh, he actually can read. He’s not an idiot!’”

While the collaborators both had a late start to their bookworm phase, another literary endeavor recently brought them together — adapting Freida McFadden’s 2022 bestseller, The Housemaid, for the big screen alongside Sydney Sweeney and Brandon Sklenar. Feig revealed that he studied the original text closely, during the process.

“I always kept it with me just because I always was referring to it a lot when I was making the movie, even though we had the script,” he explained of the novel. “I would always kind of go back for any questions I had because I really wanted to stay very true to the book because it’s so good. The only things we changed were things that we kind of plussed up to make them a little more cinematic.”

As for whether to watch the movie or read the book first? The author recently said that she supports both approaches to the story.

“I’m always kind of a ‘see the movie, then read the book and get the extra details’ kind of person, but sometimes it ruins the book for you,” she admitted. “So I think whatever people wanna do, I think it’s good either way.”