Amanda Seyfried in The Dropout. Photo / Supplied
In a group interview, Elizabeth Meriwether, Amanda Seyfried and Rebecca Jarvis discuss the new series about the fall of Theranos and their efforts to reveal the woman beneath the turtleneck.
"I really wanted to trust her," Amanda Seyfried said. "If it had all worked out, it would have been so amazing."
On a recent weekday morning at the Crosby Street Hotel, Seyfried was discussing her starring role as Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout, a limited series available to Watch in NZ on Disney+. In a room that was unremarkable save for the wallpaper's conspicuously breast-like pattern, Seyfried (Mank, Mamma Mia!) was joined by Elizabeth Meriwether, the showrunner, and Rebecca Jarvis, the journalist who created the podcast on which the series is based.
Across eight episodes, The Dropout traces the meteoric rise — and equally meteoric plummet — of the biotech startup Theranos. Seyfried plays Holmes, who founded the failed blood-testing company as a 19-year-old Stanford dropout. With a deepened voice and a wardrobe of black turtlenecks cribbed from Steve Jobs, she eventually built Theranos into a US$9 billion concern.
Theranos claimed that it could run more than 200 tests from a finger prick's worth of blood, which would have made Holmes the kind of visionary that young women — women like Seyfried — could have looked up to. But the technology never existed, and Theranos shuttered its operations in 2018. In January, a California jury found Holmes guilty of three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud by misleading investors. The trial of Sunny Balwani, Holmes' former boyfriend and Theranos' past president, will begin in March. (He is played in the series by Naveen Andrews.)
The Dropout is one of a cluster of recent and forthcoming scripted series — Inventing Anna, WeCrashed, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber — inspired by charismatic entrepreneurs with creative approaches to fact. Because Holmes has consistently denied any allegations of fraud, it is nearly impossible — despite the cover stories, the interviews, the vast documentation, the hours of videotaped depositions, the 600 pages of Holmes and Balwani's texts that were released during the trial — to know Holmes' mind and motives. This makes "The Dropout" a series built around a cipher. (No one associated with The Dropout tried to contact Holmes; Holmes' attorney Kevin Downey declined to comment for this article.)
"This show has been hard," said Meriwether, who also created the comedy New Girl. "She's a real person. There's ongoing trials. It's a really complicated story." Even talking about it was hard, and the wallpaper arguably made it harder. "I can't cry in the boob room," Meriwether said later.
Meriwether, Seyfried and Jarvis discussed — without tears — ambition, deception and the woman beneath the turtleneck. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
We might as well begin with the hardest question: Who is Elizabeth Holmes?
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: Oh boy.
AMANDA SEYFRIED: I think we're still trying to figure that out.
MERIWETHER: That was the engine for the show. She's an ambitious young woman who started a company, and it fell apart.
REBECCA JARVIS: She is an enigma. And very multifaceted. In women, ambition can be a strange thing.
MERIWETHER: Even writing the scenes of the things that I knew had happened, it was a challenge figuring out what was going on in her head. That ultimately makes the series more interesting, because there are just things about her that don't make sense.
The series is called The Dropout. What gave Holmes the confidence to drop out of Stanford at 19 and start a company?
JARVIS: While it does sound unusual, it became the archetype of the time. Think about Mark Zuckerberg, who's across the country, essentially doing the same thing. It was a moment in time where money started going to young people who were founding companies with audacious goals. You combine that with this deep desire, which she clearly had, to be insanely successful, and you add to that people in her sphere, who are powerful, telling her to make that move.
Liz, you've mostly written comedies before this project. And this story is many things — but it's not a sitcom. What drew you to it?
MERIWETHER: We're around the same age, we have the same first name, and we both were young women in positions of power. I created New Girl when I was 29. I had never been in TV before, and I really didn't know what I was doing. I made my way through it, but it was hard. There just aren't a lot of stories about young women who are given power and who are trying to navigate that. So I was really drawn to her story.
Honestly, it's been amazing to be able to do something that isn't a comedy. But coming from comedy, I was very interested in the absurdities of the world. Because as I learned more about Silicon Valley, and how everything works, it can be an absurd place. And the performance aspect of her character — the turtleneck and the voice — as somebody who has been in rooms with all men and not knowing what to do with my hands or my face, I understood that.
Well, you do have a long-standing interest in messy, charismatic women. Underneath the turtleneck, maybe she's one more.
MERIWETHER: There are a lot of layers and facets and history. I felt like people's understanding of who she was had been limited to the deep voice and the turtleneck. I was interested in going deeper, and I felt like Rebecca's podcast was made with that spirit of wanting to figure out what motivated her. It was a really hard tone to figure out. As opposed to other stories of startups that have failed, the stakes for this were so high. This was people's health. This was, in a very primal way, their blood.
Amanda, why did the series interest you?
SEYFRIED: I had been very curious about Elizabeth Holmes. I had, on my own, binged everything I could on her. I just I knew that this was something that I was going to be able to live with for a long time and explore in a completely new way for myself as an actor, somebody that's here with us and living her life. It felt like going to college, this job.
MERIWETHER: It was so much research!
SEYFRIED: I mean, I bought a book on microfluidics. I sat and I watched and listened to those deposition tapes (related to a 2018 Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit against Holmes, Balwani and Theranos). I re-listened to The Dropout. I listened to (an audiobook version of) Bad Blood. I just didn't stop, and it never got old. I felt like I was absorbing her.
At some point you had to decide what motivated her. What was it?
SEYFRIED: Belief. Our imaginations are wild, if we exercise them. I chose to just, as this character, believe in everything. And when I was told that something wasn't true, I doubled down.
Where is the line between wanting to understand her as a person, and even sympathise with her at times, while remaining cleareyed about what she did?
MERIWETHER: Actually, I don't think of it as a line. It wasn't my job to make judgments, to make pronouncements. I don't think that's good storytelling. If you can sum it up in a sentence or so, then you shouldn't spend hours watching something.
Obviously, this series is based in fact and relies on extensive reporting. How free did you feel to imagine certain scenes and situations and to invent dialogue?
MERIWETHER: The amount of time that I've spent on the phone with lawyers has really rocked me. There's a lot of information about some parts of it, and there's almost no information about her relationship with Sunny. In the places where we didn't have information, I felt like I had freedom.
JARVIS: And then there were the text messages.
MERIWETHER: After years of trying to imagine what those conversations were, we got dumped with all of the actual conversations in the middle of filming. But yeah, I really tried to do my research, because there's an enormous responsibility when these are real people in the world.
SEYFRIED: At that moment, we had been shooting for 2 1/2 months; I had been playing her for so long. To be privy to these conversations felt surreal, and to be adding them back in to enhance the show — it was a weird twilight zone at that point.
Do you think her status as a female founder contributed both to her success and the enjoyment some people found in taking her down?
MERIWETHER: The narrative of a woman in the sciences becoming a billionaire, that was definitely a story that people wanted to be true. Gender is a part of the story, but putting too much focus on it maybe takes away from other aspects of the story.
JARVIS: She was an outlier. Most female founders do not raise the kind of money she raised. And on the way down, she's an outlier as well. There hasn't been a fraud trial like this. There's a fascination when somebody is different and they find a way to break through. People want to understand why and what it is that makes them special.
Spending all of this time with Holmes' story — reporting it, writing it, inhabiting it — has it changed your mind about anything? Have any of your assumptions been challenged?
JARVIS: For me, it's a reminder to always ask questions. I didn't come to this story with assumptions. I came with huge amounts of curiosity, and it validated that pursuit. Because if you're up at night asking yourself questions, and they don't seem to have easy answers, then you need to keep asking them.
MERIWETHER: Working on this, I did revisit a lot of my experiences on New Girl, so there was a kind of personal reckoning, choices that I made and ways that I struggled.
SEYFRIED: When you're exploring the human underneath the headline, it's always going to be really confusing. Whether this person's infamous or not, it's important to me, as a human being and as an artist, to do my due diligence, pulling out the human at all costs. It made me take my responsibility as an actor even more seriously. Because she's real.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alexis Soloski
Photographs by: Jingyu Lin
© 2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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