Mamma Mia star singing a love song

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Amanda Seyfried stars in Dear John. (SCREEN GEMS)

THE last time Amanda Seyfried (pronounced sigh-frid) was in Toronto, the 24-year-old actress was obliged to face a lot of press barraging her with questions on the subject of lesbian kissing.

At the Toronto International Film Festival in September, Seyfried was publicizing not one but two movies in which she locked lips with female co-stars: Jennifer's Body (co-starring Megan Fox) and the Atom Egoyan film Chloe, in which Seyfried shared intimacies with co-star Julianne Moore.

Sleepless and exhausted upon touching down in Toronto last week, Seyfried takes some consolation that at least this time, she's free of the duty to take on the subject of Sapphic smooching.

"It was so annoying," she says. "That question ... don't ask it."

She needn't worry. Dear John, the Lasse Hallstrom movie Seyfried is promoting this time around is, by contrast, a thoroughly conventional love story. Seyfried plays Savannah, a South Carolina university student who falls for Channing Tatum's Special Forces soldier John Tyree, a man torn between his promise to his girlfriend and his duty to his country in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The movie is of the genre they used to call a "weeper." But in the wake of the horror-comedy Jennifer's Body, the austere art film Chloe, the effervescent pop musical Mamma Mia! and her season-long role on the polygamy-themed cable series Big Love, Seyfried shows an adventurous willingness to take on all genres and all kinds of roles.

"That's my job, to constantly be doing something different all the time," says the Allentown, Penn.-born actress. "If I'm going to try to be here for long, I've got to keep the audience believing me. That's important to me."

Seyfried says her personal favourite genre is the "twisted dark comedy," but she went into the conventional drama of Dear John with an understanding that the drama mostly required "trying to find that level of chemistry that's going to make the audience believe that you're truly in love."

A good love story, she says, also requires that the audience fall in love with you.

"The audience has to love you enough to want you to be in love," she says. "They want you to be happy."

Seyfried says playing the role was pretty easy. It helps, naturally, if you're in love yourself.

"I'm so connected to that part of me that's in love," says Seyfried, who apparently didn't have to act much when playing the fiancée of Dominic Cooper in Mamma Mia! in 2008. The two have been a couple ever since.

"I'm 24 and I've been with somebody for a little while and I know what that feels like," she says. "I've been in love a few times in my life and it's exciting and I like to evoke that in other people by bringing it on the screen.

"I know what it meant to me when I was younger watching love stories," she says. "I was inspired. I wanted to find love like that," she says, adding that a good love story is good for the soul.

"I think it leaves people feeling positive," she says. "And that's kind of the point, isn't it?"

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 2, 2010 C3