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It’s midday, and the winter sun shining through a window in Amanda Seyfried’s hotel suite has cast the actress in an ethereal glow.

The blond hair, hastily pulled into a single braid draped over her left shoulder, gleams. Her skin, a pearly white, is almost translucent. She looks like a porcelain doll.

On hearing the door open, the diminutive 24-year-old - who has been curled cat-like in a chair - rises slowly on six-inch Brian Atwood heels, and extends a hand.

The moment Seyfried’s fingers close, vice-like on yours, that aura of fragility disappears.

The young woman, blessed with celestial good looks and a longshoreman’s handshake, is smart, funny and tough as nails. “These shoes are hell. Hell on Earth,” says Seyfried, huge, sea-green eyes flashing. “But they look good, and that’s what counts.”

Jennifer Roberts for The Globe and Mail

Actress Amanda Seyfried in Toronto last year.

Then she flops back into her chair, kicks off the designer shoes, and settles in to chat about her new film Dear John, a weepy tale about a soldier and his honey who fall in love against the backdrop of Iraq.

The movie wasn’t a critical success, but audiences lapped it up. It was the top earner at this past weekend’s box office with $32.4 million in domestic sales, enough to knock Avatar off its No. 1 perch.

All good news for Seyfried, of course. But her highest compliment of late may still be from co-star Channing Tatum, who she says described her as “nuts” and “absolutely out of her mind.”

“My sense of humour is a bit twisted and dry. I am nuts, but I guess we all kind of are,” she says. “And I know Channing meant that in the best way. He gets me, as did Lasse [Oscar-nominated director Lasse Hallstrom].

“The three of us totally connected on the humour level. This is a serious film, which means you’ve got to play around as much as you can before the camera starts rolling. So we fooled around a lot. In fact, I’m a bit surprised we even got a movie out.”

Dear John, based on a Nicholas Sparks novel, is the love story of Savannah Curtis (Seyfried) and John Tyree (Tatum), a special forces soldier who meets the love of his life while on leave visiting his dad in South Carolina. Hallstrom (The Cider House Rules, My Life as Dog) signed Tatum on first, but auditioned scores of actresses before picking Seyfried, whom he felt would bring the necessary gravitas to the role.

“Amanda did a really great job adding her personality to the character,” the Swedish director said recently. “Her unpredictability was also very rewarding. She just has a way of avoiding clichés and obvious choices.”

Seyfried explains that she likes to mix up her movies so she’s never too comfortable.

Sure, the Pennsylvania native - whose last name is pronounced “sigh-frid” - got her start in Tina Fey’s Mean Girls playing the dim-witted Karen Smith). From there, she moved on to another (albeit untraditional) teen part on the HBO drama about polygamy Big Love. And in Mamma Mia! she plays Meryl Streep’s free-spirited daughter, Sophie. But the actress has also embraced edgier, darker parts of late.

In March 2008, Seyfried signed on to co-star with Megan Fox and Adam Brody in the black comedy/horror film Jennifer's Body, written by Diablo Cody (Juno). Then she heard that Toronto director Atom Egoyan was casting about for a lead in a new thriller Chloe. Eager to take a break from romantic comedies and try on a complex title character, she convinced Egoyan to cast her alongside with Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore.

In Chloe, set for release in March, Seyfried plays a temptress hired by a wife (Moore) to see if her husband (Neeson) will cheat. The raciest film Seyfried has made to date, she gets naked for the part and also has a steamy make out scene with Moore.

“No actor wants to be typecast,” says Seyfried, who trained in classical opera for two years and studied with a Broadway voice coach for almost five years (which explains why she was one of the strongest sets of lungs in Mamma Mia!, where she also met her boyfriend, British actor Dominic Cooper).

“ Comedies are really fun to do sometimes, but they are not as rewarding as playing a role that’s just so complex you can’t wrap your head around why this person is the way he or she is. ”— Amanda Seyfried

“Roles like that are scary, with so many moments of insecurity that you just want to walk away. But they are also just so much more fulfilling. Chloe was that movie for me.”

Egoyan’s style of direction, she adds, is totally different from Hallstrom, who let her and Tatum improvise freely.

“Lasse trusted us completely because we were playing versions of ourselves, and we all knew that. It was more about making everything feel as real as possible because that’s what the audience needs - they need to believe this love more than anything,” says Seyfried.

“Atom is the kind of director who knows the characters in his movies, better than the characters know themselves. From the moment we sat down to discuss my role as Chloe at the Sunset Marquis [hotel], we literally talked through everything. Why she did what she did? Why she makes the decisions she does? Why she dresses this way? Where she came from?

Seyfried says she also felt immense pressure on the Chloe shoot - a film rocked by the tragic, accidental death of Neeson’s wife, Natasha Richardson - not to let Egoyan and her fellow cast members down. “I just wanted it to be right, because it was so hard. I didn’t want to be the weak link. I couldn’t do that to Atom. And I couldn’t do that to Julianne and Liam.”

Given the degree of drama, both on and off the Chloe set, it’s no wonder that after that film wrapped, Seyfried signed on for another romantic comedy - coming this May, Letters to Juliet co-stars Gael Garcia Bernal and Vanessa Redgrave. It’s frothier fare than Dear John, although there are some tragic twists.

As for her next project? Seyfried says she’s ready to explore the dark side again.

“I’m looking for something kind of twisted. Actually, really dark and twisted. I like to live in a world that would never actually exist for me.”