- - “Testament of Ann Lee ”fact vs. fiction: Writer-director Mona Fastvold reveals the true story behind the musical biopic

Mike MillerJanuary 14, 2026 at 6:30 PM

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Before writer-director Mona Fastvold dove into research for her latest historical drama, she, like many today, knew the Shakers mostly through their earthly contributions to furniture design.

While their ladder-back chairs and flat panel cabinets have endured the test of time, the incredible story of their founder, Ann Lee, one of the few female religious leaders of her day, has been all but forgotten. That, in the 18th century, thousands would follow the poor daughter of a blacksmith, believing her to be the female reincarnation of Christ, seems far-fetched. That she preached abstinence and racial equality, denounced marriage and traditional gender roles, and led worship through orgiastic outbursts of song and dance, seems even more fantastical (and, indeed, landed her in prison on multiple occasions).

But these were just some of the facts that fascinated Fastvold as she went down the research rabbit hole for what would become The Testament of Ann Lee, which she wrote with her husband, The Brutalist director Brady Corbet. Born in Manchester, England, in 1736, Lee found solace in religion after losing four children at a young age, and came to believe that holiness was attainable only by forgoing “fleshly cohabitation.” During one of her stays in jail, she was beset by visions that led her to believe herself to be God’s representative on Earth — an epiphany that did not improve her tenuous standing with the Church of England.

Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

Amanda Seyfried in 'The Testament of Ann Lee'

Persecuted as a heretic, she and a small group of followers fled to America in 1774. After a harrowing cross-Atlantic journey, they landed in New York City and ultimately settled upstate, building what Lee promised would become a utopian community. While their numbers grew, eventually reaching as many as 4,000 (despite their views on procreation), the Shakers found no shortage of detractors in revolutionary America. A year after narrowly surviving a violent mob, Lee succumbed to her injuries, dying at the age of 48.

While Fastvold spent years digging into Lee’s history, her tribute to the trailblazer’s bygone dream is not overly concerned with biographical accuracy — as the film's admittedly unreliable narrator makes clear.

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"I'm not making a documentary; it's fiction," she tells Entertainment Weekly. “Ultimately, you have to let the characters come alive and start telling you where they wanna go."

The film’s thoughtful weaving of fact and fiction is perhaps best exemplified by its music. Fastvold reteamed with Oscar-winning composer Daniel Blumberg (The Brutalist) to reimagine 12 hymns from the Shaker archives, developing a more contemporary score for the quasi-musical, which also features three original songs performed by Amanda Seyfried, who stars as Lee.

Below, Fastvold breaks down her research process, helps separate fact from fiction, and explains how she infused the film with so much historical detail despite a modest budget.

Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

Stacy Martin, Scott Handy, Viola Prettejohn, Lewis Pullman, Amanda Seyfried, Matthew Beard, and Thomasin McKenzie in 'The Testament of Ann Lee'

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How did you begin your research into Ann Lee and the Shakers?

MONA FASTVOLD: There aren't a lot of books written about Mother Ann Lee, and most are out of print. So, I went up to the Hancock Shaker Village early on, and they were kind enough to let me into their archives and showed me a lot. And I also went to New Lebanon, where Ann Lee's buried as well. Then it was just really deep diving into the Massachusetts Public Library, where there is quite a lot of information about the Shakers and some scanned text. One thing will lead you to another, and one person will take you to some more information.

There's a lot of information out there, but there's also a lot of misinformation, so you really have to go digging. But I love that. I find it's so exciting that part of the process, which is just a lot of detective work. Then you have to put it aside when you start writing, because it has to become its own being, and it has to become a conversation with that story.

Roughly how long did you spend in the research phase?

I started when I was working on The World to Come (2020), which is set in a similar area in 1856. I was working with Jim Shepard and Ron Hansen on that, and they're so amazing with historical detail. So, I did learn a lot from that process and from them as well. But I think the research process for that film is what led me to discover the Shakers and Ann Lee. So, I started down the rabbit hole on this when I was in the edit for The World to Come.

And then, when I sit down to write with Brady [Corbet], it's pretty fast because I've spent so much time researching, and we spent so much time talking about the film before. That's how we work. We talk and talk and talk about the story and what it means and what we wanna say and what it is to us. And it's just this long conversation for often years before we sit down and write. So then when you're writing, you're executing, and it's quite fast. Then you just feel obsessed because I can't sleep until it's done.

Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

Amanda Seyfried in 'The Testament of Ann Lee'

During your research, was there anything you learned about Ann and her story that you wanted to include but weren’t able to fit into the film?

Yes. There are many things I couldn't include. I mean, it's an entire life, and it's two hours and 20 minutes. She suffered so much more brutality than what I included in the film, and the film's past moments are quite brutal.

She was attacked by violent mobs over and over again. After she died, they realized that there were fractures in her skull from all the various beatings that she received. So it's heartbreaking and horrible, but truly, that level of brutality that she and the other Shakers experienced, if I were to include all of that, it would be a story only about that. And I think the story had a lot more to offer.

How much of the movie would you say is historical fact versus what you needed to fill in between the lines with your imagination?

It’s interesting, so many of the scenes are based on or inspired by anecdotes and things told about her. This is also why we have this kind of unreliable narrator who says, "It could have happened this way, or it could have happened that way." But it did happen one way or another, and this was the result. She was illiterate; she never wrote anything down. There are things we know about her. We know when she was born, we know where she was born, we know she was married, we know she was the daughter of a blacksmith; these are based on records. We know she lost these children. We know that she immigrated to America and founded this community.

There are things she supposedly said and did; some are from first-person accounts, and some are from third-, fourth-, and fifth-person accounts. So, what is the story of someone's life? Even if you're writing your own biography, you do not remember what you had for breakfast the first Tuesday of the month of the year you turned 8, you know? You're saying approximately, I think this is what happened. And sometimes you misremember the past as well.

Balázs Glódi/Searchlight Pictures

Amanda Seyfried in 'The Testament of Ann Lee'

So I don't know. I mean, there are books and things you could read to fact-check, but it's also a story that contains miracles and extraordinary things, and they're presented as truth by these narrators. So I don't know if you trust them or not. We've been as truthful as we could about what we've learned about the story.

I read that you based the dancing sequences on drawings made at the time. Were there also written accounts that described what it looked like?

Oh, yes. There are these drawings I wanted to recreate towards the very end of the film, of spiral movements, but there's a lot of writing about the movements, down to specific gestures. There's a beautiful moment in their testament that describes Brother Hocknell and other believers putting their hands up and supporting this massive invisible object and saying, "This is our altar of love. We shall build upon this altar."

That moment of worship in the woods is described beautifully in their texts: the Shakers dancing and moving and shaking, throwing themselves to the ground, hitting their bodies, scratching, making wild sounds. That's described by people who were very frustrated with them in court transcripts, and that is also described in their text, but in a different way, as something joyful and wonderful. They would say, "And then we would sing and dance for days," you know? So it's inspired by those various accounts.

Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

Amanda Seyfried in 'The Testament of Ann Lee'

Speaking of people being annoyed with them, I love the sequence on the ship to America when their singing and dancing starts to grate on the other passengers. But by the end, the Shakers’ resolve and faith in the face of such hardship earn their respect.

It's such a wonderful anecdote from their testament. It's described there very briefly, but I found another account of the captain that apparently also said they were instrumental in bringing the ship safely to America.

But creating that sequence was incredibly difficult. I couldn't build a ship, obviously. I couldn't afford that in our budget. We had to find a real tall ship. It's very hard to find a tall ship that's historically accurate. There are very few of them in the world, and they all go on a joint regatta in the summers, which was when we were shooting. Apparently, that's when all the tall ships go on a trip together. [Laughs]

So we were searching for this one ship all over the world, and finally we found one in Sweden, so that's where we had to go and shoot, and luckily they were kind enough to let us shoot on it. It's almost like a museum now. It's a beautifully handcrafted piece of art, this ship with these incredible hand-stitched sails. But there were only so many angles you could shoot it because it had to stay docked, because we couldn't afford another ship following our ship.

Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

Mona Fastvold with cast and crew on the set of 'The Testament of Ann Lee'

How did you make it all work?

We had to put everything on the dock, like our rain towers and snow and everything, and luckily, I found these specialists who were willing to come and put up the sails for us, so that could be in our background. And we combined that with another smaller period ship that we could take out to the open sea and bring our cast out, which was also very hard because the sea was quite rough. Everyone was getting very ill.

And then we built this small, tiny little interior set in Hungary that we could completely flood. But then, because we couldn't build a ship, it wasn't moving the way the ocean was. So every single performer had to mimic the movement of the ocean to my count of left, right, left, until we ended, and then the camera would counter that movement. So it's a combination of these beautiful sequences shot on this incredible real ship, but there's also a man standing off to the side, throwing buckets of water at my cast. [Laughs]

Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

Amanda Seyfried and Lewis Pullman in 'The Testament of Ann Lee'

I also wanted to ask you about Ann’s brother, William (played by Lewis Pullman), who is queer in the film. What did you find in your research that led you to portray him that way?

There are things about William that I didn't include in the story. The real William left his wife and children when he joined the religion. And we know that he had very long hair and that he was very elegant and loved beautiful [things]. It was a real sacrifice for him to give up all these beautiful objects, apparently.

We know they were incredibly close, and that was truly the heart of the story for me: this sibling relationship and the love they had for each other. At that time, this was pre-Victorian, so there weren't these labels about sexuality. There was a bit more freedom around sexuality and less stigma. In my interpretation of the past, there were less labels, and there was less shame connected to anything that was not normal, cis-relationships.

But at the same time, there was no place for that in society at all. So I thought that the Shaker community, with the celibacy and the different interpretations of things that they offered in terms of gender roles and how to live together, I assumed that it must have attracted a lot of queer people who needed a place to be safe and not be in a straight relationship. So even though celibacy is not a great solution to that, I think it must have done that much. So I wanted to represent that.

I also liked representing his relationship as light and airy and beautiful because, especially in period pieces, there's always so much shame and guilt in their stories. I wanted there to be less of that.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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