Watch: Amanda Seyfried and Thomas Sadoski Break Up After 9 Years of Marriage
As soon as life started speeding up for Amanda Seyfried, she was ready to slow down.
Long before she became a mom to daughter Nina, 9, and son Thomas, 5, the Mamma Mia! star bought a house in the upstate New York hamlet of Stone Ridge in 2013—though not least because it seemed like a nice place to raise a family.
Seyfried knew she wanted to have kids, she told Vogue in early 2015, fresh from moving in after extensive renovations on her new-old property. “I want them to go to local schools,” she explained, “and there are some really good schools around here. I would like my life to be the same as it is now, but with a little less stress and a little less work.”
Her plan then unfolded accordingly, as if she had ESPN or something.
She met her future husband and father of her kids Thomas Sadoski in 2015 when they costarred in an off-Broadway production of Neil LaBute‘s The Way We Get By. And when they eloped in March 2017, shortly before Nina was born, they already had a family home.
And so it will remain, even though Seyfried and Sadoski announced Sept. 15 that they had separated after nine years of marriage.
They split up “a while ago,” the exes said in a joint statement to People, “and it’s proven to be the right move for us and our family unit. We’ve got each other forever—and it’s GOOD.”
ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
There has been a fair amount of upheaval in Seyfried’s life this summer, with the 40-year-old also saying goodbye to her beloved dog Finn in July. The Australian Shepherd had been the constant in her life when everything else was in flux earlier in her career.
“Having Finn to come home to when I was in my 20s in Hollywood helped keep me grounded,” the Mean Girls alum told Forbes in 2024. “My pets truly keep me balanced.”
Back in 2016 the actress said that she and Sadoski planned to get a goat and a pig—”They’re going to grow up together,” she told Allure, “so there shouldn’t be trouble”—plus, they already had four chickens, a rooster and two rescue cats.
And Seyfried loved her country-esque life, gushing over the “cute strip mall” and cozy vibe.
“There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts, a reflexology place,” she shared. “Even the grocery store is special. It’s the classic small-town grocery. There’s a lot of local things happening. And then I go to the farm stand. Everything you get is absolutely local. But I also have a garden.”
Her menagerie has since grown to include horses, goats, donkeys and ducks, and living far from the hustle and bustle has ensured that when duty does call, the Pennsylvania native doesn’t get too overwhelmed.
John Nacion/WWD via Getty Images
“Staying here was the best decision for privacy, peace and nature,” Seyfried told Forbes of her upstate abode, which is about a two-hour drive from Manhattan. “It offers a more balanced life than the city does.”
Having a “peaceful place to call home,” Seyfried added, allows her to better acclimate “to the faster lifestyle of the city, the high-energy of press events and life on-set.”
And she’s had a lot of fast-paced life to balance out in recent years, scoring Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for her performance as silent screen star Marion Davies in 2020’s Mank, then winning an Emmy in 2022 for her turn as disgraced entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu’s The Dropout.
Jeremy Chan/Getty Images
But Seyfried admitted to E! News at the Golden Globes in January—where she was a dual nominee for her film The Testament of Ann Lee and Peacock series Long Bright River—that “the choices are harder to make because you’re away from your kids.”
Hence the actress, who was at the Toronto International Film Festival Sept. 13 for the premiere of her latest film The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd, trying to chose quality over quantity when it comes to work that requires she leave the house.
At least when Seyfried has to stay in New York City, she has decorated her “very neutral apartment” with her daughter’s artwork, she told House Beautiful in October 2024, recounting how her personal palette was mostly blacks, whites and grays before becoming a mom. “After I had kids, I knew I needed to go out of my comfort zone. I really, really love pinks and neons.”
She could do without any color on her white kitchen cabinets, though, noting that “if you drip spaghetti sauce on it or even water or coffee, you got to clean it up right away. But nobody is as focused on the cabinets as I am. And that’s okay. I do not fault that, to each their own.”
Seyfried has spoken candidly about her struggles with anxiety and having OCD, telling Allure she still had moments of “debilitating” insecurity when she wonders why in the world anyone is interested in taking her picture.
But she does like the dressing-up part of the business, when so much of the picture-taking happens.
Neilson Barnard/MG24/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue
The red carpet is “loud and unnatural,” Seyfried told Vogue in 2015, “but I do still get excited when I put on the chosen dress for the evening because I feel confident. Fashion can do that to you.”
She has been a face of Givenchy and Miu Miu, as well as a global brand ambassador for Lancôme since 2019. And for the 2024 Met Gala she asked for a sustainable look, hence her silver Prada dress repurposing material from the Italian design house’s spring 2009 collection.
“My team, I let them do whatever the eff they want,” Seyfried, who also sported a silver hairpiece, told E! News at the gala. “They’re artists. I’m the model. We have fun.”
It’s also more fun attending events, Seyfried told Forbes, knowing “the next day I’ll be home and even happier in my boots in the mud feeding the animals.”
Since she keeps her kids off social media, it’s the animals who provide the aw fodder for her 7.1 million Instagram followers, though Nina and Thomas are in those pictures in spirit.
Amanda Seyfried/Instagram
“I can see them learning what a responsibility and treat it is to care for pets, even at their young ages,” Seyfried said. “I think all pets give us purpose. And because they do so much to enrich our lives, we are responsible for theirs—which includes managing their health and wellness.”
A fair trade, since it’s so much easier for Seyfried to manage her own health and wellness on the farm she calls home.
And Seyfried is hardly alone when it comes to letting distance make the heart grow fonder for acting. See more stars who’ve left Hollywood—whether physically or metaphorically—to keep it extra real when they’re off camera:
Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images
Justine Yeung/Prime Video
Sergei Bachlakov/CBS
Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney
Ellen and her wife Portia de Rossi have since moved to the Cotswolds, deciding to stay put in November 2024 after Donald Trump‘s reelection, the talk show host told to Richard Bacon in a July 2025 conversation at the Everyman theater in Cheltenham.”It’s absolutely beautiful,” she gushed about the English countryside, per the BBC. “We’re just not used to seeing this kind of beauty. The villages and the towns and the architecture—everything you see is charming and it’s just a simpler way of life.”It’s clean,” Ellen continued. “Everything here is just better—the way animals are treated, people are polite. I just love it here. We moved here in November, which was not the ideal time, but I saw snow for the first time in my life. We love it here. Portia flew her horses here, and I have chickens, and we had sheep for about two weeks.”
Noam Galai/Getty Images
Amy Sussman/Getty Images
Annalisa Ranzoni/Getty Images
Chris Haston/WBTV via Getty Images
John Lamparski/WireImage
Karwai Tang/WireImage
Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for National Board of Review
Jason Mendez/Getty Images
Matt Baron/BEI/Shutterstock
Jon Kopaloff/WireImage
Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Common Ground
Steve Granitz/WireImage
Tim Rooke/Shutterstock
Matthias Nareyek/Getty Images
John Lamparski/Getty Images
Andrew H. Walker/Variety/REX/Shutterstock
Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
Jamie McCarthy/WireImage
Larry Busacca/Getty Images
Rob Latour/Shutterstock
Paul Drinkwater/NBC
Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images
