Amanda Seyfried reveals she nearly tried cocaine after Mean Girls fame
Mean Girls made Amanda Seyfried a star overnight — and nearly sent her down a darker path. In a new interview, she says the pressure had her considering cocaine, but her obsessive-compulsive disorder and a hyper-cautious approach kept her from the young-Hollywood spiral.
If you reckon anyone had a 'starter pack for Hollywood mayhem' in the 2000s, Amanda Seyfried would be top of the list: breakout star turn in Mean Girls, suddenly in Los Angeles at 18, and surrounded by people who made clubbing look like a full-time job. But, as she tells it, Seyfried swerved the worst of it – unlike some notorious contemporaries – and apparently owes much of that to her own anxiety, and just plain old-fashioned fear.
Seyfried Remembers Her Mad Twenties
Speaking to GQ, Seyfried was refreshingly honest about the temptations she faced as a young star in Hollywood. There's the expected talk of wild behaviour, parties, and plenty of opportunities to go off the rails. Though, unlike her Mean Girls co-star and friend Lindsay Lohan – who was tabloid catnip in those years – Seyfried managed to dodge the sort of infamy that stuck to others.
Her take on it?
'The outsized bashing is ugly. It’s like a fear of mine. I would not want to be spotlit for being infamous in any way.'
Can't say I blame her, to be honest.
Hollywood Nights: Not Always So Glam
Seyfried isn't pretending she led a cloistered life. She admits she hit the clubs:
'Did I go clubbing? Yeah.'
There's a scene out of a fever dream in her memories: fresh off a Reefer Madness screening, she's somehow at Val Kilmer's house at 1 am, in the pool, with fellow Mean Girls actors Daniel Franzese and Jonathan Bennett. Seyfried says she doesn't even remember actually meeting Kilmer, just landing at his place. She wraps up the whole period bluntly:
'My 20s were ridiculous. I found myself in many places.'
Then there’s the key fork-in-the-road moment. Seyfried describes a specific party at the Chateau Marmont, the sort of place where every Hollywood cautionary tale eventually makes a pit-stop. She had the option to try cocaine for the first time – pretty much a box-tick on the era’s social calendar – but she didn’t, because she was scared. That 'limit', as she calls it, meant she never let herself get so out of it she couldn’t get home.
The OCD Factor
Seyfried’s talked previously about how her obsessive-compulsive disorder was a kind of backhanded superpower. While it made some things tougher, it also drew a line when it came to reckless partying. She credits this with keeping her from spiralling in the aftermath of sudden fame.
- Breakout role: Mean Girls, age 18
- Party scene: Clubs, celebrity house parties, LA nightlife
- Temptations refused: Never tried cocaine, avoided infamy
- Personal anchor: Anxiety and OCD kept things (just about) sensible
- Comparison: Lindsay Lohan, fellow Mean Girls star, took a different – far more public – route
- Current status: Still working, still largely scandal-free