Amanda Seyfried Instagram – Amanda Seyfried’s new Peacock limited series ‘Long Bright River,’ premiering Thursday, follows Mickey, who comes across a mystery that hits close to home. Her sister Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings), an addict who spent time as a sex worker, is missing just as a number of other women like her are found dead. As Mickey, an unlikely (and sometimes not very adept) officer, hunts down the killer she also looks for her sister, leading her to grapple with her own role in the community as someone who also feels like an outsider.
“Long Bright River” is set in Kensington, a neighborhood of the city known for being a hub of the opioid epidemic, and a place where Moore has both researched and volunteered for years now.
Liz Moore, the author of “Long Bright River,” the novel on which Seyfried’s new show is based and who co-created the series with showrunner Nikki Toscano, brought with her a wealth of knowledge, not just about the interior life of Seyfried’s Mickey, a Philadelphia cop, but also the world she occupies.
The show follows the same general contours of the novel. The story sprang out of Moore’s attachment to Kensington, which she first visited in 2009 shortly after she moved to the region. She had been assigned to write the accompanying text for a photo essay about the neighborhood, and got “very nerdy” about its history.
“I also felt very moved just by being in conversation with a lot of the people who were there experiencing addiction and in some cases doing sex work to support their substance use disorder,” she says. “And I have a very long family history of addiction so I also felt personally tied to the community in a kind of intangible way and I ended up returning to the neighborhood over and over to do volunteer work.” That work included leading community writing workshops at a women’s day shelter.
Seyfried and Moore sat down with The Times. Read more at the link in @latimes_entertainment’s bio.
🖊️ @ezwrites
📸 Matt Infante / Peacock | Posted on 13/Mar/2025 21:48:50
