“They better hurry up, because we’re all getting old,” Dominic Cooper quips of a potential third ‘Mamma Mia!’ film
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(jpeg)/amanda-seyfried-dominic-cooper-reunite-at-HIFF-100726-1-7e63730110864d7fa5c5de311d7214a5.jpg "Amanda Seyfried and Dominic Cooper reunite at HIFF")
Credit: Courtesy Bloomerang PR
NEED TO KNOW
- Amanda Seyfried and her Mamma Mia! costar Dominic Cooper had a quick catch-up at the Hamptons International Film Festival on Saturday, Oct. 3
- Seyfried was at the festival to screen her movie The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd, while Cooper’s The Lightkeeper also played in the Hamptons
- Both actors weigh in on a potential third movie in the Mamma Mia! franchise
Dominic Cooper and Amanda Seyfried had a mini Mamma Mia! reunion while attending the Hamptons International Film Festival over the weekend.
Cooper, 48, and Seyfried, 40, costarred in the hit 2008 movie musical and its 2018 sequel, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, and even dated for three years before splitting in 2011.
As luck would have it, the former couple — now longtime friends — were both in the Hamptons, New York, on Saturday, Oct. 3, for premieres of their respective new movies, The Lightkeeper and The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd. They even posed for a photo together!
Speaking with PEOPLE ahead of The Lightkeeper‘s premiere, Cooper admits he “didn’t see the big picture” of the lasting impact Mamma Mia! would have when he and Seyfried filmed the original movie alongside Meryl Streep, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård, Pierce Brosnan, Julie Walters and Christine Baranski.
“I can only see that now,” he says, sharing the “extraordinary” impact he’s since been privy to.
Parents have shared memories with Cooper of watching Mamma Mia! on repeat with their children. “Children watched it [our movie] every day, five times a day! So the parents of the children feel very connected with it because they remember their baby being young or their little child. And then there’s a group of people who used to go dancing and singing and just laughing constantly [watching it] and it filled people with joy.”
Credit: Courtesy Bloomerang PR
Cooper says Mamma Mia! fans have also told him over the years that the movie brought them comfort during the final days of their loved ones’ lives. “That, for me, is just extraordinary to be part of that,” he says.
He calls making the films “a joyous time as well. It’s a fun bunch of people. I’m desperate to make number three, which is constantly being spoken about.”
Seyfried and several other Mamma Mia! stars have repeatedly expressed interest in returning for a third installment over the years, and Cooper is just as eager to reunite with the cast.
“I came up with a great storyline for it. I said it on the red carpet recently, but I’ve realized that I’ve got the whole storyline wrong from the other one, so it didn’t really work,” he jokes. “I thought Amanda and I’d split up [in the sequel], but we get back together. I thought the whole film we could do a whole, like, we meet on the Greek island at someone else’s wedding and get back together.”
He quips, “By the end of this weekend, maybe Amanda and I will come up with the third. They better hurry up, because we’re all getting old. No one’s going to want to see these oldies on the beach.”
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The two ran into each other “for the first time in a long time” at the festival, Seyfried tells PEOPLE on the red carpet for The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd. She describes Cooper as “hilarious.”
“Our lives are very different. We live in very different places and I just have nothing but good feelings about him,” she says. Though the two haven’t kept in close touch in recent years, Seyfried says that “when you’re with somebody for a long time when you’re younger, it just kind of evolves into this familial, nice, soft kind of bond.”
Seyfried, who has expressed enthusiasm for a third Mamma Mia! movie over the years, says she has no concrete update on whether another sequel is moving forward.
“I kept wanting to say yes and put it into the universe, manifest a Mamma Mia! 3, but all I can say is tick tock,” she says.
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Credit: Universal/courtesy Everett Collection
In 2023, Mamma Mia! producer Judy Craymer told Variety that she already had a storyline in mind for a third film.
“It just always takes a certain amount of time with Mamma Mia,” she said at the time, noting that ABBA members Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson “always take a certain amount of convincing.”
Cooper, who has been in a relationship with actress Gemma Chan since 2018, stars in The Lightkeeper as an Irish lighthouse keeper struggling with grief years after the deaths of his wife and son in 1924.
Seyfried stars opposite Scoot McNairy in Tim Blake Nelson‘s The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd. She plays a woman who falls in love with an incarcerated man while teaching creative writing classes at an Oklahoma prison.
Neither film has a release date yet.
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