She was promoting Long Bright River, a miniseries in which she stars as a police officer in a city ravaged by the opioid crisis, and in a classic late-night-show bit, she was asked if she plays any instruments. Fallon brought out the dulcimer, and with the memory of the 2025 Southern California wildfires fresh in her mind, Seyfried sang part of Joni Mitchell’s “California”. “I would love to play something about a state which deserves a lot of love right now,” she said.
Dulcimer in hand, she performed a pitch-perfect rendition, not easy when you’re going note-for-note with Mitchell’s ’70s-era soprano. “Are you kidding me?” Fallon yelled out in excitement, leaping out of his seat. He later said, “It was one of the most viral videos that ever went out of our show in the history of our show.”
“The reason it was so viral was because it wasn’t meant to be,” Seyfried says now. “And because it was happy.”
The moment earned her praise from the most unexpected sources – including Beck, the Grammy-winning musician, whom she bumped into on the Upper West Side in New York. “I was walking a block,” says Seyfried. “He jumped out of a car and he was like, ‘You were so great. My daughter has been learning to play that.’ And I was like, ‘This is fucking great.’ And we had a great conversation. I don’t know him, I’ve never met him before. Fucking musician Beck? Like, thank you, sir.”
What the audience didn’t know was that Seyfried had learned to play the dulcimer during the pandemic, while preparing for a Joni Mitchell biopic that she was attached to. “It was a movie about her and [manager] Elliot Roberts,” she says. “Then he died – but not before I met him.”
She also met Mitchell at her house in Los Angeles.
“I sat on the floor petting one of the dogs,” Seyfried says. “She told me a lot of stories.” They shared a steak dinner, and then Mitchell put on Blue, the record widely regarded as Mitchell’s masterpiece and one of the greatest albums ever. “She’s like, ‘We’ll put on the album and light a fire,’” Seyfried says. “After we listened to the album, she’s like, ‘It’s sparse, isn’t it?’” Seyfried feigns fainting. “It’s perfect!”
As the world shut down, Seyfried locked in and learned to play all of Blue – alternating between piano, guitar and dulcimer – as well as Mitchell classics “The Circle Game” and “Both Sides Now”. “The day that I finished learning the last song on the album, ‘[The Last Time I Saw] Richard’, I fucking wept,” Seyfried says. “I felt like a bona fide musician, like I belong here. I felt like I had put my own flag on the top of the mountain. Because it was a fucking mountain, I tell you.”
But the project never came together, and, reportedly, Cameron Crowe is directing a different Joni Mitchell biopic. (“Apparently a lot of people reached out to Cameron Crowe and were like, ‘What the fuck are you doing, dude?’” Seyfried says. “I don’t know what he said, but from my knowledge, his version is, she’s really young and then she’s older.”)
