9 Wild Behind-the-Scenes Facts from “Mamma Mia! ”(Including Which Two Stars Dated in Real Life!)
- - - 9 Wild Behind-the-Scenes Facts from “Mamma Mia! ”(Including Which Two Stars Dated in Real Life!)
Francesca GarianoJuly 19, 2025 at 9:30 PM
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Meryl Streep and Amanda Seyfried in 'Mamma Mia!' (2008).
Mamma Mia! originated as a jukebox musical in the West End in 1999 before the show made its way to Broadway in 2001. The film adaptation came in July 2008, with a star-studded cast at the helm.
In the movie, Meryl Streep portrays Donna Sheridan, the manager of the hotel Villa Donna in Greece, and mother to Amanda Seyfried's character Sophie, who is set to get married to her fiancé, Sky. Donna hosts Sophie’s wedding with the help of her friends, Tanya (Christine Baranski) and Rosie (Julie Walters), while Sophie cooks up a plan of her own.
In an effort to discover the identity of her father, she invites three of her mom’s exes to her wedding without Donna’s knowledge: Sam Carmichael (Pierce Brosnan), Bill Anderson (Stellan Skarsgård) and Harry Bright (Colin Firth).
Mamma Mia! was a box office success, earning $610 million worldwide, per Box Office Mojo. It went on to spawn a sequel in 2018, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, which followed a young Donna (Lily James), Tanya (Jessica Keenan Wynn) and Rosie (Alexa Davies) after their graduation from Oxford University. All the while, in the present day, Sophie is pregnant and preparing to reopen her mom’s hotel after her death.
From mishaps on set to the real-life bonds the cast formed, here are 9 behind-the-scenes facts you didn't know about Mamma Mia!.
Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgård were “freaked out” by their singing parts
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Stellan Skarsgard, Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth in 'Mamma Mia!' (2008).
While Brosnan has mastered the art of drama throughout his career, singing didn’t come naturally to the former Bond star. During a May 2025 interview with Vanity Fair, he admitted to being “terrified” to sing in Mamma Mia!, though his costars Firth and Skarsgård helped alleviate some of his fears.
Reflecting on the recording of “SOS,” Brosnan called it “a warhorse of a song.” He explained, "It's not an easy song to sing, and I was mildly terrified. I remember going out to Air Studios to record the songs."
The actor continued, "The only thing that kind of gave me some solace and some peace was to see Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgård look as equally freaked out as I was as we sat down with Benny [Andersson] and Björn [Ulvaeus] and went straight into recording the songs."
This gave Skarsgård the same amount of comfort, with the actor telling Vanity Fair in February 2024, “It was absurd to ask me to be in a musical. I can’t sing, I can’t dance. And then I saw it was also Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth, and they can’t sing and dance either, so I felt a little safer there.”
The cast of Mamma Mia! hung out every single night
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Julie Walters, Meryl Streep and Christine Baranski in 'Mamma Mia!' (2008).
There’s no shortage of entertainment for viewers when it comes to Mamma Mia! and as it turns out, the cast had just as much filming the movie, too.
Baranski opened up to PEOPLE in March 2025 about her experience filming the movie, explaining that it was just as “wonderful” behind-the-scenes as it was to see the final product.
When asked what her favorite memory was of filming, the actress explained, “All of it. All of it. I mean, every night, and when we'd finish filming, we'd all go out together.”
Baranski added, “We would have the most wonderful time. It's the most wonderful group of people. We would all do it again because it was just a love affair.”
Amanda Seyfried got drunk with her grandmother at the wrap party
Amanda Seyfried/Instagram
Amanda Seyfried at the 'Mamma Mia!' movie wrap party in 2007.
Ain’t no party like a Mamma Mia! wrap party.
In March 2025, nearly two decades after the first movie, Seyfried shared some behind-the-scenes details about the movie’s wrap party, including a hilarious moment with her grandmother.
“That was 18 years ago, I can't even do the math. But that wrap party specifically, I was drunk. Everybody was,” she explained to PEOPLE. “My grandmother was at that wrap party and she was slightly drunk. She and my mom were there visiting. They always came everywhere I went and she lived until she was 99.”
Amanda Seyfried and Dominic Cooper dated in real life
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Dominic Cooper and Amanda Seyfried in 'Mamma Mia!' (2008).
Seyfried and Cooper, who portrayed the character Sky, met while they filmed Mamma Mia! and then dated for several years until their split in 2011. Seyfried eventually met her now husband, Thomas Sadoski, while working on the off-Broadway play The Way We Get By in 2015. The couple married in 2017 and have welcomed two children together, Nina and Thomas.
When Seyfried and Cooper both returned for the 2018 Mamma Mia! sequel, Sadoski had some thoughts about their on-screen reunion. Speaking to The Mirror in July 2018, Seyfried shared, “I think he has the same kind of issues that I would have if we were hanging out with his ex-girlfriend from long ago.”
“I think it’s always like, ‘I’m so in love with this person, so that person must be so in love with her too,' ” she added. “I’d guess he assumed Dominic is in love with me the way he’s in love with me. And it’s just not the case, it’s sweet. I’d rather he be jealous than completely fine with it.”
In addition to Seyfried’s husband, Cher also had an opinion about the actress’ former relationship.
Cooper told Vanity Fair in July 2018, “She took one look at me and didn’t trust me at all—and told me so herself, which I laughed out loud at. After Amanda made it clear that we used to, once upon a time, be together, Cher said [to Seyfried], ‘You dodged a bullet there.’ ”
Stellan Skarsgård “hated” dancing
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Amanda Seyfried and Stellan Skarsgard in 'Mamma Mia!' (2008).
While singing didn’t come naturally to the group of actors playing Sophie’s potential fathers, neither did dancing. Baranski spoke about her experience on Mamma Mia! during a May 2025 episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, recalling that Skarsgård “hated” dancing in one particular scene.
“We finally went down the hill and ‘Dancing Queen’ and landed on the dock,” she explained. “Then it was the end of the number. The camera would move around, and it usually would avoid Stellan. Then finally, the director said, ‘Stellan, okay, it's time for your close up. You have got to do the moves now. You have simply got to do the moves.’ "
Despite allegedly letting out “a string of expletives” and insisting he couldn’t complete the task, Skarsgård did the choreography.
Much like their camaraderie when it came to singing, Firth and Brosnan weren’t far behind with their hatred for dancing, either. Baranski joked to Vulture in February 2022, “Just to get them to sing the song and put one foot in front of another and raise a glass of beer together, it was like rocket science."
Pierce Brosnan agreed to do Mamma Mia! to work with Meryl Streep
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Pierce Brosnan and Meryl Streep in 'Mamma Mia!' (2008).
There was only one name Brosnan needed to hear in order to sign onto the project: Meryl Streep.
Brosnan spoke to Vanity Fair in April 2025 about how the opportunity for Mamma Mia! came to him. At the time, he shared, “My agent called me and said ‘You’ve got a job with Meryl Streep.’ I thought, ‘Oh, my heavens, this is magnificent. This is incredible. Meryl Streep? They’re really taking me seriously.’ “
“He said ‘Yeah, it’s Mamma Mia!’ “ Brosnan recalled. “I said, ‘What? Mamma Mia! the musical?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Great. Where is it? How much?’ And it was Greece.”
Brosnan admitted to Vogue in September 2023 that the type of project wasn’t something that would have typically been on his radar, telling the publication, “A musical was the last thing I had in mind for my career, so I was completely bowled over by the offer.”
He clarified, “But I was also over the moon to get to work with Meryl. Then, of course, I realized that meant I’d have to sing.”
The cast were not drinking ouzo on set
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Christine Baranski and Julie Walters in 'Mamma Mia Here We Go Again!' (2018).
For years across social media, fans have been convinced that the cast of Mamma Mia! were drunk on set due to ouzo, a Greek aperitif. However, Baranski set the record straight during a December 2020 interview with Collider, telling the outlet, “No, there wasn’t ever Ouzo on set.”
“It was that Pierce Brosnan wanted to take us all to dinner one night near the end of the shoot – the first Mamma Mia! – and we had dinner and then we went to hear some jazz music somewhere,” she explained. “And we started drinking this – it’s not called Ouzo – it’s Cipro or something. But that sounds like the antibiotic.”
The outlet confirmed the cast was drinking the spirit Tsipouro, not the antibiotic Cipro, as Baranski added, “None of us knew it, but this thing that we were drinking as though it was just really good tequila, gives you this hangover.”
“After, the next day, if you have even a little bit of water, it reactivates the effect of this drink,” Baranski said. “I remember I didn’t have to work the next day, but I had to keep reading the same paragraph ... I kept reading and rereading and nothing would stick ... whatever we were drinking, whoa, powerful stuff.”
Amanda Seyfried and Meryl Streep had a special bond
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Meryl Streep and Amanda Seyfried in 'Mamma Mia!' (2008).
Seyfried and Streep had a special bond to help portray their mother-daughter relationship on-screen. Speaking to the Daily Mail in November 2008, the director Phyllida Lloyd recalled a moment from Mamma Mia! when the actresses were singing “Slipping Through My Fingers,” calling it a “very special song for all of us.”
“There was great tenderness between Meryl and Amanda and they both identified strongly with the scene,” she explained. “We talked about all the things that might happen when a mother and daughter help each other get ready for a wedding, and I just let them improvise as Meryl painted Amanda's toenails.”
Streep also had a suggestion to make the scene even more powerful, with Lloyd adding, “It was Meryl who suggested that Amanda should sit on the chair with her. It was incredibly touching to watch them doing this scene.”
Members of ABBA made cameos in the movies
Photoshot/Everett Collection
Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson at the Mama Mia: Here We Go Again Premiere in London.
ABBA members Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson not only composed the music for Mamma Mia! the musical, but they also made cameos in both films.
During Mamma Mia!, Andersson appeared as a piano player on a boat during the “Dancing Queen” scene. Ulvaeus appeared during the end credits as a Greek god while the cast performed the tune “Waterloo.”
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