Elizabeth Holmes and Amanda Seyfried have at least one thing in common besides their uncanny ability to keep from blinking: They both really hate watching “The Dropout.”
Hulu’s 2022 limited series, starring Seyfried as Holmes, has had a resurgence in popularity since the release of “You Can See Everything.” The much-hyped documentary, by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, was shot largely in the weeks before Holmes went to prison over her fraudulent claims about Theranos’s supposedly revolutionary diagnostic technology.
The film was so secret that its first trailer came as a huge surprise. When it finally came out in mid-October, one of its biggest shocks was Fielder’s bringing in Seyfried to anchor the second half.
“The Dropout” traces Holmes’s life from her teenage years to her rapid ascent as the Theranos chief executive to her spectacular collapse when the science behind the company’s key invention fails to stand up to scrutiny. Seyfried’s performance as Holmes, one of her best to date, won her an Emmy.
It wasn’t just about the accuracy of her Holmes impression (although it was excellent). It was the fact that Seyfried, alongside the “Dropout” creator Elizabeth Meriwether, created a portrait of Holmes that considers the complexity of her experience without excusing her actions.
The show traces the arc of Holmes’s all-consuming ambition but also examines the roots of her frustration and fury when people fail to take her seriously. It also treats her sexual assault while at Stanford as more than a fleeting moment on the way to stardom, as many accounts of Holmes’s life tend to do. Where others may have sensationalized the story, “The Dropout” dug deeper into its nuance.
The real-life Holmes, or at least the one portrayed in “You Can See Everything,” cuts a frustratingly slippery figure. Her default answer to tricky questions is most often a legally sound “I don’t remember.” In conversation, her penetrating stare becomes even more unnerving when paired with her unwavering placidity. But when Fielder asks her to watch “The Dropout,” she reacts with visceral distaste.
Holmes tenses up watching Seyfried, the glossy Hollywood version of herself, bouncing around a set of her childhood bedroom. She curls up into herself during a later episode as Seyfried dances robotically to Lil Wayne. She groans aloud at a scene of Seyfried’s facsimile having a nasty argument with Naveen Andrews’s Sunny Balwani, who was then Holmes’s partner in both business and life.
“I really don’t want to watch this,” she protests, turning away from the screen and covering her face to hide her tears. Maybe she doesn’t recognize the show’s interpretation of events; maybe she just hates seeing it play out on TV. Either way, it is perhaps the only time in the documentary that Holmes has a recognizable emotional reaction.
With the second half of “You Can See Everything” unfolding after Holmes goes to prison, it is Seyfried’s turn to confront her past. Fielder initially brings in the actress as a kind of expert witness — she’s one of the few people who have thought as much as he has about Holmes’s motivations.
Seyfried, fascinated by Fielder’s insight into her post-trial life, admits she still sometimes feels “a little haunted” by Holmes. When Fielder shows her the footage of Holmes watching “The Dropout,” however, her fascination curdles into horror. While Holmes cringes at her dancing, Seyfried practically crawls out of her own skin. When she sees Holmes lie back in tears, she calls it “heartbreaking.”
Plenty of actors have portrayed real-life figures onscreen, but few have seen the aftermath of it as Seyfried does in “You Can See Everything.” Forced to face the subject of her performance head-on, she can’t help but empathize. When she and Fielder visit Holmes’s partner, Billy Evans, in the film’s most explosive scene, Seyfried’s suspicion of him leads to a passionate defense of Holmes’s dignity. Fielder doesn’t comment, but he can’t keep from smiling as their composure unravels.
As with Fielder’s TV shows “The Rehearsal” and “The Curse,” “You Can See Everything” is preoccupied with performance and perception — how they shape and inform one another, why they shift and who it affects. In all his projects, Fielder invites scrutiny about his own perceptions and motivations. In “You Can See Everything,” the result is an unsettling Möbius strip that leaves viewers wondering whether any of it is authentic or true, and what that might actually mean.
Seyfried soon falls even further through the looking glass. She slips back into Holmes’s skin, deep voice, chapped lips and all, to recreate Fielder’s recollections of events that weren’t captured on camera. Seeing Seyfried re-enact moments from the film’s first half with Holmes’s benign smile plastered on her face is genuinely spooky. It’s also kind of a relief. After spending two hours of “You Can See Everything” with Holmes herself, there’s some comfort in regaining the distance of a scripted performance.
That doesn’t last for long. Fielder’s usual tricks and techniques keep hitting the wall of Holmes’s eerie calm, even when performed by Seyfried. Neither of them can crack her code, and their opposing reactions to their frustration seem to take them both by surprise.
After confronting Evans and re-enacting several scenes opposite Fielder, Seyfried becomes far less sympathetic to Holmes’s unease. Playing Holmes from a script again gives her more room to treat her as a character to interpret, an approach Fielder tries to resist.
Their final scene together, in which they grapple with Fielder’s final interaction with Holmes, is tense. Each challenges the other’s interpretation of events. Seyfried questions whether Fielder is misleading her in order to protect Holmes. Fielder suggests that a key scene in “The Dropout” leaves no room for the possibility of her innocence, which he says would make it a lie.
At this point, Seyfried has had enough. “They’re not lies,” she snaps. “It’s [expletive] TV. You know.”
Fielder is indeed no stranger to people questioning the veracity of his TV shows. But he still can’t square his experience of Holmes with Seyfried’s idea of her, which leaves them at an impasse. In “The Dropout,” Seyfried synthesized reality, research and performance to create what she seems to believe was a truthful representation of Holmes. To Fielder, the only way to ensure accuracy is to be entirely honest — but what does “honest” even mean?
Neither of them can say. By the end of “You Can See Everything,” the only thing they know for sure is that no one’s truth will ever match their own.
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