Love Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes doc? Here’s what to know about ‘The Dropout’

If you haven’t seen it yet, stop reading now and come back after you do. And if you have seen it, don’t miss our spoiler-heavy revelations about “You Can See Everything.”

One last warning before we proceed: Spoilers ahead.

Before “You Can See Everything” put Holmes back in the spotlight, Amanda Seyfried portrayed the Theranos CEO in the Hulu limited series “The Dropout,” winning a lead actress Emmy for the role.

In the documentary, Holmes tells Fielder she has never watched the series. After his prodding, they watch it together — along with Holmes’ partner Billy Evans — in a Del Mar beach cottage days before she is set to leave her family, including two young children, to report to a Texas prison to serve an 11-year sentence after being convicted of fraud.

We revisited our previous coverage of “The Dropout,” including what Seyfried told us about preparing for the role and what Liz Meriwether, who created the series, had to say about the project.

In an interview with The Times in 2022, Seyfried recounted telling filmmaker David Fincher about the role, who made a suggestion about how to play Holmes: “He turned to me, and he said, ‘This Theranos girl, she’s not listening.’ And I was like, ‘You’re right!’ Watch her listen. She’s playing listening. … Everything is like, ‘Do you see me listen? Make sure you see that I’m listening to you.’ It’s one of the things that helped her succeed. So much of it was an act, and her bubble was bound to burst. It must have been so tiring.”

During “You Can See Everything,” we observe Holmes watching Seyfried dance in a scene from “The Dropout,” a much-memed moment in the series.

“My favorite thing was getting to express Elizabeth Holmes’ frustration through dance. A character working her s— out. A lot of it was based on the fact that she was a dance student,” Seyfried said.

Holmes cringes at seeing it portrayed onscreen (if you’ve ever had your own dancing or karaoke sessions broadcast, you know the feeling).

In the documentary, Holmes and Evans also claim research wasn’t done before creating the series. Seyfried told us she spent months listening to the 10 hours of deposition tapes in preparation, something she also mentions in “You Can See Everything.” The actor, in a separate interview with The Times published in March 2022, also spoke about how she learned to mimic Holmes’ baritone voice.

Meanwhile, for the dialogue in “The Dropout,” Meriwether discussed getting access to texts sent between Holmes and her former romantic partner, Theranos COO Sunny Balwani, in an essay she wrote for The Envelope in August 2022.

“I had been on conference calls with lawyers for hours discussing every detail, every word, every action line in every script,” she wrote. “The writers had to justify our choices based on the facts we had, so we had scoured the source material, trying to piece together the mystery of what had happened between Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani behind closed doors at Theranos. And here I was about to open an attachment with the actual text messages that Elizabeth and Sunny had written to each other. It was thrilling and infuriating.”

Dive deeper into “The Dropout,” including the final episode in which a fictional version of Evans appears, with our previous coverage below.

‘I’d never fully embodied somebody that way,’ the actor says of playing Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.

For Liz Meriwether, getting new transcripts as she was shooting the Amanda Seyfried drama was both terrifying and exhilarating.

Series creator Liz Meriwether and director Erica Watson on Linda Tanner, Billy Evans, Sunny Balwani and how they decided to end Elizabeth Holmes’ saga.

From studying depositions and speaking to farm animals to perfecting the position of her tongue, Seyfried explains how she nailed Holmes’ baritone.

Showrunner Liz Meriwether explains how she found a dramatic through line in the ever-changing, often absurd case of the disgraced Theranos founder.

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