Spoiler alert! The following story contains major details about Elizabeth Holmes' documentary “You Can See Everything” (now in theaters).
If you haven’t yet seen the new Nathan Fielder movie, then you’re probably wondering why the heck it’s rated R?
After all, it’s a three-hour doc comprised of long scenes of the comedian sitting on the couch with Elizabeth Holmes in the weeks leading up to her prison sentence. Fielder grills the ex-Theranos CEO about whether she ever deliberately lied to investors about her unsound blood-testing startup, and how her seemingly particular word choices can deceive or confuse people.
But the R-rating becomes enormously clear within the film’s first 40 minutes, with a suggestive sequence of Holmes’ domineering fiancé,
Billy Evans, vigorously working up a sweat in the gym. He then takes the movie's title to a whole new level, as it cuts to a full-frontal shot of Evans in the shower, staring at the bathroom wall as he brushes his teeth.
In an interview with Vulture published Oct. 19, co-director Lance Oppenheim said that it wasn’t the filmmakers’ idea to give the audience an eyeful. Oppenheim, Fielder and a seven-person crew spent just over a month with Holmes and her family at a San Diego rental home in 2023, shooting for up to 16 hours a day. They agreed not to film privileged legal calls, but otherwise, everything else was fair game.
“You get to their house, and her computer’s open," Oppenheim told Vulture. "All of her emails are open. Her journal is open on the side of the couch.”
According to the article, Oppenheim accompanied Evans to the gym one day and asked what else he was planning to do afterward. Evans told Oppenheim that he would need to shower, and before the filmmaker could propose a more tasteful workaround, Evans stripped naked for the cameras and hopped in.
“It seems like he really had something he wanted to show to us and to the world,” Oppenheim said of the exposing display.
When it was first revealed last month that “You Can See Everything” was rated R for “graphic nudity,” social media exploded with speculation that it was Holmes or Fielder who would be seen in the buff. (Fielder, after all, famously went full-frontal in his 2023 Showtime series “The Curse,” although that was largely believed to be a prosthetic penis.)
Fielder said that he hasn't "seen a lot" of the internet's theories about "You Can See Everything."
“I definitely understand that people would project stuff onto a new project that feels like stuff I’ve done in the past," Fielder told Wired magazine in a cover story published Oct. 19. "But this is a totally unique thing. It feels, to me, so different than what I’ve done before in the way it came together, in the way it functions, and what we’re able to explore in it.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Here's why the Elizabeth Holmes documentary has a graphic nude scene
