The Testaments Star Amy Seimetz Talks HBO's The Idol Exit
Amy Seimetz
Dave Allocca
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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.’”
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This yields rich rewards in The Testaments, Hulu’s upcoming sequel series set a few 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-