Down the River
Dark secrets, fractured families and the weight of addiction – star Amanda Seyfried joins the team behind Long Bright River to delve into a book-to-screen adaptation that hits close to home.
When the US actors’ strike came to an end in November 2023 after 118 days of protest and picketing, Amanda Seyfried was looking for her next project.
The star is synonymous with movies including Mean Girls and Mamma Mia, but more recently has taken to television with leading roles in series such as The Dropout and The Crowded Room. She also had a recurring role in Twin Peaks: The Return, the long-awaited third season of David Lynch’s mystery drama set 25 years after the iconic original series.
It was on the recommendation of her agent that Seyfried then picked up a copy of Liz Moore’s 2020 novel Long Bright River, a story about two sisters – one a police officer, the other an addict – set against the backdrop of the opioid crisis in Philadelphia.
After hearing how much her agent liked it, “I was like, ‘Damn it. OK, I’m going to go read this book’ – and I read it in two days,” the actor tells DQ at Series Mania, where the show was screened as part of the festival’s International Competition. “It was perfect because I was looking for something that I could really climb up with. I just thought about how unique this story is, how present I felt in a neighbourhood I had never been to and how the point of view of all these characters and understanding the community from the inside out was really fascinating, because it was a community hit so hard by the opioid epidemic.”
In particular, Seyfried could relate to the sister storyline and the focus on addiction “so much… too much. And man, these are the kinds of stories that make the world go round,” she continues. “No wonder it was such a popular book, and of course they have to make a series about this. More people are going to get to this story, get their hands on the story. It’s going to change their lives.”
Long Bright River has now been adapted for television as an eight-part suspense thriller commissioned by US streamer Peacock. It tells the story of Mickey (Seyfried), a police officer who patrols a Philadelphia neighbourhood struggling with the opioid crisis. When a series of murders begins, Mickey realises her personal history might be related to the case.
Produced by Sony Pictures Television and UCP, the show also stars Nicholas Pinnock, Ashleigh Cummings, Callum Vinson and John Doman. Nikki Toscano (The Offer) is the showrunner, with executive producer Moore also writing on the series. Sony is also the distributor and has sold the show into Canada (Crave and USA Network), Australia (Stan), South Korea (LG Uplus), the UK (Channel 4), Ireland (RTÉ) and Spain (Movistar Plus+), among numerous other territories worldwide.
Long Bright River isn’t the first US drama to tackle the opioid crisis, following titles like Dopesick and Painkiller that broadly explore the origins and consequences of the epidemic. However, when she was the novel on which this new series is based, Moore says she wasn’t interested in sticking to a particular theme or writing an allegory, and instead wanted her book to focus on a specific family story.
“It was not my intention to moralise at all about addiction or about a community or anything,” she says. “Instead, I always enter through place and through character. The family at the heart of the story, Nikki and her sister Kacey [Cummings], [was what] I found most compelling. I thought telling their story as specifically as possible, and drawing a little bit from my own family history and also from the community work I was doing in Kensington [in Philadelphia] at the time, would result in a story that felt universal, and I think that’s what we were interested in as well [in the TV series].
“Sometimes the series gets attention because it’s about an American issue, the opioid crisis, or a universal issue – addiction in a general sense – but none of us were interested making it an allegory. We always wanted to tell a specific story about two characters and the world they live in.”
Importantly, “it’s not about every family in Kensington. It’s about one family,” says Toscano.
When the showrunner first picked up Moore’s book – the novelist’s fourth – she immediately imagined how it might work as a television series that blends family drama, a murder mystery and a host of compelling characters.
“Liz does such a wonderful job of conveying a sense of place. I knew it would be fun and challenging, more to the point, to bring this community to life,” she says. “But for me, I just loved the idea. I’m a murder-mystery girl and to have this unique way of telling a story that was not just a thriller but was a family story was something I thought was artfully done. The book weaves between the past and the present and uses the past to inform the present so that it tells a complete narrative over time that is parallel to the present-day storyline. Ultimately, we wanted to make the series do the same.”
Toscano and Moore partnered to write the initial three episodes and a series bible that informed the rest of the story, before going into a writers room where Alye Capone, Tricia V Johnson, Alexandra McNally and Russell Rothberg picked up additional episodes.
When another of her books was optioned in past, Moore was not interested in joining the adaptation process. But when it came to Long Bright River, she felt a deeper connection to the story, as she still lives in Philadelphia and has close friends in the city.
“I am so protective of the neighbourhood of Kensington that I almost felt a duty or a responsibility to follow the project along and to make sure the community felt seen and respected,” she says. “Fortunately, everybody else on the project had that same mission or agenda. It was a really wonderful experience to see how embraced the members of the community – who came on set and played small and large roles and did graffiti art and provided music or original songs or anything – were embraced by the working actors, our leads, our showrunner and every department head, and how much they were allowed to feed off each other. That was very meaningful.”
The series didn’t film in the real Kensington, however, with Moore wanting to put some distance between the story and the real town at its centre. “It was important to all of us to create a space that felt somewhat apart and to allow members of the community to opt in, rather than the reverse, and I’m happy to say that they did in droves. This show feels almost like a memento of a very specific moment in all of our lives when we all came together and intersected and made something collectively that we’re all quite proud of,” she adds.
Seyfried found she had “certain ins” to help her get into character to play Mickey, thanks to her experience of growing up in a working-class household in Pennsylvania, in the suburbs close to Philadelphia.
“I also felt like, in some way, I needed to play Mickey in order to bring something home, maybe in a therapeutic way for myself,” she says. “A lot of characters you end up taking end up being very therapeutic experiences. But [there are] also the hard parts of never being able to feel like I could ever have a sense of authority within myself or in the world around me, and challenging myself to put on that uniform and really take ownership of Mickey and throw my own shit away.
“We always bring our shit to work; artists especially really do. I had a lot of challenges right in front of me and I just had to grab all of them.”
Seyfried knew that if she was going to play Mickey for the “fun reasons,” like portraying a cop for the first time, playing a mother and helping to build the Philadelphia seen on screen, she also had to play the hard parts “and watch ODs happen and learn how to use [opiod medication] Narcan and remind myself of the real struggle and the responsibility of all that.”
“It was a lot,” she adds. “It’s very challenging. It was worth every fucking second, and they created a role… Mickey is very unique for me. In all of her failings – in all the shit she carries around, all of her guilt – everybody can see themselves in Mickey. Creating characters like that is hard to do.”
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tagged in: Amanda Seyfried, Liz Moore, Long Bright River, Nikki Toscano, Peacock, Sony Pictures Television, UCP