Amanda Seyfried has been a screen favorite since the film ‘Mean Girls,’ but her two decades in Hollywood have not been without their ups and downs.

The Oscar contender, 35, recently acknowledged that being in the spotlight still causes her anxiety and panic attacks. “It feels like life or death,” she told Willie Geist on Sunday’s TODAY.

She stated, “It feels like life or death. That’s what a panic attack is, really. Your body just goes into fight or flight. The endorphin rush and the dump that happens after the panic attack is so extraordinary. You just feel so relieved and your body is just kind of recovered in a way. It’s so bizarre because it’s physiological, but it starts in your head.”

Amanda Seyfried in Mank | CREDIT: NETFLIX

Seyfried has been a celebrity for the most of her life. She’s been married to actor Thomas Sadoski since 2017, which has further added to her fame. But winning an Academy Award for best supporting actress for her role as Marion Davies in David Fincher’s “Mank” has raised her profile even higher, and with it, her fight to show others that she is grounded.

The actress said that she struggled with showing people that she’s “normal,” adding, “I do not have someone waking me up with breakfast in bed, and I’m not chauffeured around.”

“And every time I meet someone new, I’m just so desperate for them to understand that you can talk to me. I wanna connect like everybody else, because I am like everybody else.”

Seyfried’s 7-month-old newborn son also made an appearance during the interview. She said that working from home requires her to “squeeze in so much more work” but that the “The benefits outweigh everything.”

Amanda also confessed that relocating to a rural area (upstate New York) had made her feel more “grounded.”

She said on ‘Sunday Today with Willie Geist’: “It was very conscious. I’ve always wanted to live on a farm. I just need to feel grounded somewhere that I can trust will always be there.”

She even acknowledges that she had no idea she had been nominated for an Academy Award. Her mother was the one who woke her up to inform her about the nomination.

After playing as Marion Davies in David Fincher’s Mank, a film inspired on the production of Citizen Kane, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

She acknowledged, “It hasn’t really hit me yet. It’s a recognition, it’s an achievement that I didn’t really set out to expect. I was never desperate for it.”