SPOILER alert: This story contains spoilers for “Rya,” the sixth episode of “The Crowded Room,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
For the first five episodes of Apple TV+’s “The Crowded Room,” audiences have known Amanda Seyfried’s character Rya only as the psychiatrist sitting across the table from Danny (Tom Holland) during their jailhouse sessions at Rikers Island.
To this point, the series has ricocheted back and forth in the timeline of Danny’s life, piecing together the story of a young man whose point of view is influenced ––and shattered –– by the trauma of his childhood and the people who seep into his world.
But it always finds its way back to his sessions with Rya, the anchor in his otherwise fraught circumstances — awaiting trial for his involvement in a shooting in Rockefeller Center. This is Danny’s story, but audiences would be justified in wondering why there isn’t more of Seyfried, the reigning Emmy winner for Best Actress in a Limited Series for Hulu’s “The Dropout.”
Well, this week’s sixth episode answers that question. Simply titled “Rya,” the episode shifts the focus entirely to Seyfried to not only live in the character’s world for the first time, but also see Danny’s story through fresh eyes –– and it’s quickly made clear why her perspective has been held back.
As an outsider observer, Rya’s version of events finally confirms what every viewer has probably already suspected — Danny has dissociative identity disorder (DID), or rather multiple personalities.
From the moment she signed on, Seyfried was nervous about carrying the weight of this revealing midseason narrative detour. “It is tricky, because you are with Danny and you are understanding more of his backstory and his life and his present— and then all of a sudden, you press pause on that,” she tells PvNew. “It is always scary being that character that you start engaging with suddenly, because you wonder if the audience will want to go with me. But it’s important you do, because she is supplying a lot of the information you are going to need from this point forward.”
The episode reveals Rya is a professor on the hunt for tenure who is asked to consult on Danny’s case when the cops find something amiss about his demeanor. She first meets Danny while he is still in a holding cell, but he’s a jarringly more aggressive person than Danny’s shaky recollection of events has so far shown.
“Yes, she could get tenure and contribute to the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] and create space in the mental health world,” Seyfried says. “But it is all anchored in an unrelenting need to help this kid. That was unwavering for me. I never worried the audience would think she was just a selfish, greedy bitch.”
The series also happens to offer Seyfried a character type she’s found elusive in her career ––the platonic lead.
“From the beginning, they need each other, and there’s a palpable chemistry that is not romantic or sexual,” she says. “It is as pure as anything, and I’ve never got to play that before.”
Through subsequent interviews, Rya picks up on the subtleties of Danny’s DID, a diagnosis that was not a common or widely accepted in the 1970s when the show is set. By episode’s end, she even talks to one of his more protective personalities –– Jack, the British man played on screen by Jason Issacs. He also lets slip there are other “alters” within Danny, meaning more of the cast could be creations of his mind. This all intrigues and concerns Rya, something her male colleagues dismiss as a predatory interest to further her career.
She spent her first weeks on set filming the interview scenes between Rya and Danny in sequence, and then stepped away to film Rya’s backstory for Episode 6. “We ended up coming back into the interrogation room after Episode 6, and it was just a monumental shift in my experience of the show in a really beautiful and helpful way,” Seyfried says. “It was amazing that I had that opportunity to revisit that room with that new world of getting to know Rya and having lived her journey as an actor.”
In the episode, Rya’s work consumes her more than she admits. She and her son Ezra (Thomas Parobek) don’t have the strongest bond, and she has a tenuous relationship with her ex-husband, who’s Ezra’s father (Daniel London). With one episode to catch the audience up on who she is, Seyfried says they couldn’t be shy about laying bare the good and the bad about Rya.
“She is a mess,” she says. “I wanted to reflect what it is to be a working parent and a single parent. I didn’t want her to be completely confident. Part of the thing that attracted me to playing Rya is that she is very unapologetic in a lot of ways, and asks for what she wants, but that doesn’t mean that her life is easy or that she is fully confident in every step she takes.”
Seyfried says it surprises even her how much she has grown to love “playing mothers” now that she is the mother of two.
“I thought I was going to be all, ‘Fuck the patriarchy,’” she says. “But once a baby pops out of your body, all of a sudden, your roles shift. I appreciate the perspective of being a mother in my life, and I just love playing characters like this so much.”
Seyfried found other shades of her life in Rya’s story, specifically within the character’s somewhat tense relationship with her mother, played by Laila Robins. Rya is seen leaning heavily on her mother to watch Ezra while she works, an opportunity her mother often uses to criticize how much work she brings home.
“The relationship with her mother really cut deep for me, because it is so similar to the relationship I have with my mother, as she is my main caregiver for our kids outside of my husband and me,” Seyfried says.
It is something she again relied on while filming “The Crowded Room,” as she shares the screen with her husband Thomas Sadoski as Matty, the cop who first introduces Rya to Danny.
Seyfried and Sadoski worked together in the 2015 film “The Last Word” and the Neil LaBute stage play “The Way We Get By.” It was “The Crowded Room” creator Akiva Goldsman who asked Seyfried if she was comfortable with him offering Sadoski the role.
“With this massive budget, with him in a cop uniform in the ‘70s, it was just so much fun,” Seyfried says. “We have a shorthand, and we work really well together. But we also have to make sure someone is with the kids, and we try not to work at the same time. Akiva asked if he could offer Tommy the role, and it is small enough we wouldn’t be working together too many days, and they would get some great chemistry.”
With audiences now clued in on Rya’s full history and commitment to Danny’s cause, Seyfried says the rest of the series will find their stories more clearly intertwined.
“You can expect to see them kind of hold hands and jump together,” she says. “He has found someone in the world who will protect him at any cost, and that would give anyone hope.”
“The Crowded Room’s” critical reception has not been warm since its premiere in June. Even before reviews were released, Seyfried seemed to anticipate the series’ polarizing nature and echoed more recent comments by Holland, expressing her hope its message of empathy for those experiencing abuse and mental health issues will transcend everything else.
“This is a bigger picture show,” Seyfried says. “People are going to like it or they aren’t, but at least they are going to be reminded that sexual abuse is real, even though it feels like it can’t possibly be. If we know that this exists, maybe we can have more compassion for people who are struggling or who are different from us because we have no idea where they are coming from.”
