If you can remember back to season two of Gossip Girl, you may recall an episode about aspiring designer Jenny Humphrey (Taylor Momsen) attempting to earn funding for her eponymous fashion line by staging a guerrilla show at a charity gala. In the middle of the stuffy reception, Jenny commandeers the A/V system, blasting punk rock while a squad of models, clad in her early-aughts emo designs, climb on tables.
Even the most dedicated Gossip Girl superfans may be surprised to learn that two of the models in that scene are The Testament of Ann Lee director Mona Fastvold and her longtime collaborator, Ann Lee choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall. In a stroke of Hollywood luck, the pair met that day, becoming fast friends and launching a creative collaboration that would extend for nearly two decades. The 20-somethings worked together on music videos until their first major project: 2018’s Vox Lux, which was directed by Fastvold’s partner Brady Corbet, based on a story by Corbet and Fastvold, and choreographed by Rowlson-Hall.
But even during the Vox Lux days, Fastvold was dreaming of Mother Ann Lee, the founder of 18th-century religious sect the Shakers. “I remember probably close to a decade ago, her saying, ‘I want to make a film about Ann Lee,’” Rowlson-Hall tells Vanity Fair. It wasn’t until 2023 that Fastvold gave her collaborator an actual script and asked her to join the team. “I said, ‘Absolutely.’ I mean, I was gonna make it anyway. You know what I mean? We’re collaborators for life.”
The most expansive project in their partnership to date, The Testament of Ann Lee interprets the life of Ann Lee, played in the film by Amanda Seyfried, as a musical, transforming old Shaker hymns and their full-bodied worship (or “shaking”) into sequences of choreographed, euphoric dance. With some old images and a couple written accounts as historical guidance, Fastvold’s directive to Rowlson-Hall was simple: Go crazy.
As it happens, Rowlson-Hall grew up in a family that subscribed to another intense religion: Christian Science. That sect, she notes, was also founded by a woman. “I wanted to be Jesus when I was a little girl,” she says. Being chosen for Ann Lee felt like divine intervention: “It was just tapping into my entire youth and existence, and that prayer and that desire to have a connection to God.”
