Amanda Seyfried Is in Her Element

We meet, at Amanda Seyfried’s suggestion, in the middle of nowhere. That’s to say, we meet at a discreet and casually elegant upstate restaurant. On an eminence at the heart of the sprawling property, the restaurant overlooks a painter’s delight of fields, woods, and distant hills, a mosaic of brown and gold on this cloudy late-fall day. When the actor slips in the door—tiny, barefaced, looking like a teenager in jeans and an oversized button-down shirt, her enormous, intensely green eyes alight in her luminous face behind waves of blond hair still damp from the shower—she greets the staff warmly.