In A MOUTHFUL OF AIR, a successful children’s book author is thrust into a losing battle with postpartum depression.
We spoke with stars Amanda Seyfried and Finn Wittrock who talked about their initial reactions when reading the powerful and poignant script. Seyfried told us, "I thought it was something that was really accessible. When you’re talking about something this heavy and this important, you gotta be really careful and delicate with the subject matter, but you also wanna drive a point home which is that so many people suffer in silence, and there is not enough support for women after they give birth." She added, "I thought it was told from a really raw, really generous, compassionate perspective."
Wittrock plays Seyfried's character's husband. He said "I remember reading the script and thinking there was so much under the surface, there’s so much not said, it felt, like, almost Chekov like in how much subtext there was." He added, "It was really a challenge, but a worthy one."
Seyfried spoke about bringing her own experience as a mother to this role, saying, "Once you become a parent, you tend to experience things a little deeper. I think I definitely could have and would have played this character before I had kids, but it just resonated a lot deeper for me and vibrated in a different way, and some scenes were generated from a different place in me that didn’t really exist or hadn’t had access to before."
Wittrock ended our conversation by describing what he hopes audiences will take away from this film, saying, "We are trying to shed light on something that is often unspoken, but that happens to a lot of people. A lot of mothers. A lot of caregivers. So I hope that people realize how complicated and how hard it is to put illness like this in a box."
Check out our full interview with the stars of A MOUTHFUL OF AIR:
A MOUTHFUL OF AIR opens on October 29!
All images courtesy of Sony Pictures.