Editor’s note: This article contains major spoilers for the documentary “You Can See Everything.”
“Well, guys, what should we talk about?”
This is a joke offered by one of three people on a Zoom with Rolling Stone one October afternoon. Because like virtually
everybody who’s been to the movies in the past month, and even many who haven’t, the subject these three are most keen to chat about is the brain-boggling, meme-launching, WTF-did-I-just-watch documentary You Can See Everything.
If you haven’t seen it yet, you undoubtedly know the elevator pitch: Nathan Fielder embeds himself in the home of convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, right before Holmes reports to prison. You also know the major conversation-starter moments: The shower scene. The egg-whipping. The abundant close-ups of unblinking stares.
The one thing that makes this virtual coffee klatch a little different is that the folks ready to discuss the ins and outs of this cultural phenomenon include Fielder and his co-director, Lance Oppenheim. And if you’re among the many, many folks who’ve helped turn this gonzo experiment in nonfiction filmmaking into a blockbuster, you can likely guess who the third person in the chat might be. Hint: It’s not Holmes.
Rather, it’s the woman who’s played her not once, but now twice — Amanda Seyfried, the Dropout star whose presence in the documentary’s second half has been one of the best-kept moviegoing secrets in recent memory, and the aspect that sends it into a whole new stratosphere of mind-fuckery.
Seyfried joined her co-conspirators for an exclusive conversation — her first time on the record about the film, and the first time the three collaborators have discussed it since the premiere — to talk about how she was drawn into the project, that awkward on-camera phone call with Holmes, and how they’ve all been processing the experience. Making and releasing the film has been an emotional roller coaster for each of them (Oppenheim says it “made my brain and body feel on fire”), but Seyfried, for one, has enjoyed the ride.
“I have no regrets,” she says. “I’m having the time of my life right now!”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Oppenheim: Well, where should we start?
Seyfried: My first question is: What am I doing here? What am I doing in this movie? How did I get here?
Fielder: That’s a great question, Amanda. How did you get here?
Oppenheim: I feel like there was a certain point in the process of making this where we wanted to expand the bubble [of people involved in the project]. But so many of the people we reached out to didn’t want to be on camera because Elizabeth had this toxic reputation.
Fielder: This was two years after we had shot in that beach house with them. We were just like, “Where do we go next?” The Dropout kept coming up. Elizabeth’s parents really had very strong feelings about it, and they felt it was one of the main ways the general public knew about who Elizabeth Holmes was. So we thought it would be interesting to talk to you.
I got your phone number through Emma Stone. We had a 30-minute Zoom, and you were like, “Yeah, come over with cameras.” We wanted to show you what became the first half of the film, and then we would talk about it. That’s all you agreed to.
The crazy thing to me [was that] you didn’t go through any talent reps or anyone. You just said, “Yeah, come over!” Why did you trust us like that?
Seyfried: I remember when [Emma] texted, and I was like, “Nathan Fielder? Ooh, I wonder if he wants to make something with me?”
My sister is a big fan [of yours, Nathan], and I know a lot of people are big fans of Nathan for You. I’d only seen The Curse. When you said you had 90 minutes of footage for me to see and help you work through, I was like, “Oh, he just wants some advice. He just wants us to know about my experience playing her and researching her and going into the mind of that quote-unquote character I portrayed.” After the Zoom, I was totally game to do whatever you needed. It was just your energy [that persuaded me], and how much time you had spent [on this project], and that nobody knew this was happening.
“It felt dangerous. I wanted answers. We all had this need to understand who was pulling the strings.”
Amanda Seyfried
Oppenheim: Weren’t you nervous?
Seyfried: I wasn’t nervous. There were just way more people than I expected coming into my apartment [laughs]. I had just gotten back from the Venice Film Festival, and I said this is the only time I can do it; I’m just never in the city. I didn’t know how long it was going to take. I thought, “Wait a minute, there’s cameras. I should probably put on some mascara …” There was no protection. There was no advocate for me. I just felt like I was totally game because I was so invested in what you were doing, and already had this strange level of trust in you guys.
Fielder: It’s not dissimilar to Elizabeth, I guess, who also just had a strange level of trust.
Seyfried: Not dissimilar … but not super similar, I would say.
Fielder: Thanks for clarifying [laughs].
Seyfried: I would say there was a lot of risk in the back of my head, and then when I told my agent and lawyer that I had already done it? Not the normal process [laughs]. But I go off and do my own thing sometimes, and nobody had any say or control over what I was doing with Nathan and Lance. My lawyer was like, “Well, now we have to retroactively set your deal in place because you need protection.” We weren’t even considering reenactments at that point.
Fielder: We should clarify that because, yeah, all you’d agreed to was just coming in, and we’d show you the stuff and talk.
Seyfried: I wasn’t even a subject at that point.
Oppenheim: I think you said that you’d never play this person again. When we started showing you that stuff — there was a moment in the conversation where you started imitating her on camera, and you gave Nathan this look. What brought you back into that?
Seyfried: Muscle memory. I think the reason I was able to capture my version of Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout was not her Nightline interview, or 60 Minutes, or whatever footage I’d seen. It was the 10 hours of deposition tapes, where she was present and completely consistent. That’s the thing that my brain is locked into. So even though it had been a bunch of years, I see her again in the footage … and I can’t help but tilt my head a little bit. It’s muscle memory when you play a character as intensely as I did for as long as I did. I do think there’s something almost uncontrollable. When I was talking to you, it was already coming out of me in some way.
“It wasn’t until I was sitting across from you in those re-creations that I realized how well I understood Liz’s tendencies.”
Nathan Fielder
Fielder: You started doing it, but you never actually said you would play her again. It’s so interesting, because the process of making this was to try to give as much information as we could to the audience on how we interpreted these moments that were happening in the house and with her. Anything that didn’t happen on camera, we took notes of. But we were talking about the oddness of these early meetings, and we always assumed that, well, obviously these things can’t be part of the film. But then we were sort of like, “Wait, would the idea of doing a re-creation work?” At first we didn’t even consider it because we thought it was a little lame, maybe, to do these types of things. But the way you engaged with it when we shot at your apartment, it felt to us like there was something in you. It was like you wanted to revisit it.
Oppenheim: It felt like you had unfinished business — like it was pouring out of you. You were unresolved or something.
Fielder: Did you have something unresolved?
Seyfried: Don’t we all? [Laughs.] I mean, now that people have seen the movie, isn’t everybody kind of feeling that? That’s the thing about how powerful this whole project is, the nuance of it and its capacity to be all things. You can’t resolve any of it. You can learn about how you feel and you can learn about your perspective on things, but …
It’s not that I was unresolved; it’s that I had more information now because of [your] footage. Anybody who’s watched this documentary knows that the first 90 [minutes] or so, there’s a lot of information there. So the idea that I could go on this journey with you guys, however you needed me, in whatever capacity, was very interesting to me.
Fielder: We started having conversations about: “OK, would you portray her again?” All I said was that we’d want you to re-create some initial conversations that happened off-camera. But then we also said, because this is a documentary, we didn’t want to discuss these scenes or show you scripts in advance. We just want you to show up, and we’ll talk about the scenes on camera. Anything that comes up in those conversations will potentially be part of it. People should know that you had no creative control over this project. Anything that was filmed—
Seyfried: No approval. Whatsoever.
Fielder: You had no approval over anything. You were just engaging with these scenes for the first time. Were you nervous at any point during this?
Seyfried: Yes! I mean, there was always this vibration of risk and that sensation of: Am I going to destroy my career in some way? Am I going to get entangled in this, like, wasp’s nest with Billy? Am I gonna say the wrong thing? Am I gonna perpetuate negativity for her? Everything was scary, but I still had that drive that was more in the front seat — which was the literal front seat with you in the car. I was just like, “Let’s go, buddy! I want to put my hand in the fire!”
Fielder: We just had planned to do those first few re-creations, the meeting and the one at the house. Nothing beyond that. And then you were getting drawn in, and it seemed like you had to go to Billy. You’re now in this process, and it’s not like we can drive this thing forward because so much is based on your comfort level. What made you want to keep going beyond those re-creations?
Seyfried: I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s the same as whatever was driving you guys this whole time.
Fielder: Why did you want to meet Billy?
Seyfried: I just … [pauses]. It felt dangerous. I wanted answers. We all had this need to understand who was pulling the strings. What he was doing and how he was in the footage that I saw, how you guys were interacting — it felt yucky to me. I just wanted any information I could get on Billy. I became this weird Billy detective because I had gotten such strong negative feelings from him in the footage. I felt like I needed to meet this guy. It was exciting to me, and it was scary, and it was questionable.
You wanted that, too, but it had to come from me because I don’t think you would have put me in that position. I did feel protected by you guys pretty early on. I felt like I trusted you. Even though I kept jokingly saying, “You’re not going to ruin my life, right?”
Fielder: And what was my answer? I forget.
Seyfried: “I’m not trying to. But maybe.” [Laughs.] Just kidding.
Fielder: That sounds like what I would say, actually.
Oppenheim: It was such a gigantic leap of faith. I don’t know if you know how amazing and also how insane it was that you were willing to put yourself out there in this way.
Seyfried: But I want people to know that it wasn’t like I jumped into the deep end. It was a process. “What are you doing on this date?” “I don’t know. I’m busy on this date, but I’m around on this date?” “OK, let’s meet here.” So it was just a step-by-step process. It wasn’t like a script, and we were going to shoot it. I wasn’t committing to shooting a movie. I was committing to each event or moment, and those are little leaps of faith that ended up feeling bigger.
Oppenheim: If you’re saying you’re a “Billy detective,” what did you feel after you met him? Did your feelings change at all?
Seyfried: Nothing changed. It only got worse. That’s very clear in the doc, I think.
Fielder: Did you feel like, “Oh, he’s different?” Or were you like, “He’s the same guy I saw in that footage?”
Seyfried: I had to put on a different hat [when I met him]. I was filtered. I wouldn’t necessarily call it acting, but … I was thinking about how I wanted to protect myself, but I also wanted to give the guy a chance to be as he is. I wanted to turn my disdain off a little bit, because I’m in his house now with his children — with their children. I always want to give people the benefit of the doubt, and I felt bad that I had talked a bunch of shit about him up until that point.
Because look, I do not like him. But I’m coming into this man’s house. I just wanted to be a presence, the way that you guys are so good at being present in these situations. But you also knew him. The whole crew knew him, and he knew them. Billy doesn’t know me at all. He just assumes many things about me, which is normal.
So I’m just trying to engage with him, and it’s fine. It’s going fine. And then [Elizabeth] calls, and that was just … what an experience for somebody to have, to say the least. Everything I’m feeling, you can see. I don’t even have to describe it to you.
“The moment that I’ll probably be thinking about on my deathbed is the dinner scene between you and Billy.”
Lance Oppenheim
Fielder: I want people to know that everything that’s outside of the scripted reenactments, like that phone call, that’s all coming from you — we’re not saying, “Well, you have to say this or that” in any of these things. This is all just happening in real time.
Seyfried: We didn’t know she was gonna call right then. And I am sitting there with her children and cuddling with her dog! While she’s in prison! And then she calls, and … Someone asked me if that was real, if that was really her on the phone. And I’m like, “It’s a documentary. Who else would it be?”
Oppenheim: Every time I watch the movie, it feels like your performance in the reenactments evolves, from that first one to the final one.
Seyfried: From insecurity to … um, security. [Laughs.]
Oppenheim: Did anything change over the course of it? Was it something in the way you prepared, or did experiencing all the stuff you did with us impact anything?
Seyfried: I think it had to do with intensity. I mean, that last scene in the prison is all from Nathan’s memory. [To Nathan] You did an amazing job trying to remember everything.
Fielder: The second I got out [of the visiting room], I recorded everything I could remember into my phone.
Seyfried: You did your due diligence with that. I think the stakes were so high at that point for all of us because it had just happened. The reenactments I was doing from the beginning … [they] were things that had happened when you were with them years prior. I was still insecure about it, and I was like, “I don’t know if I can still do the voice.” Also, the audience will have just seen her for 90 minutes — how are they gonna just suspend disbelief? It was very much like, “How am I going to do this? I don’t know if I can capture her anymore.”
And then by the end, I had been doing it enough, and I really had a good time in the pizza house doing the A24 meeting [where we show Billy negotiating for movie profits]. I really got my stride, and then the stakes were so high because you had literally just gone to the prison. For most of the filming, we were like, “When are you gonna go? When can you go?”
Fielder: We were really focused on trying to get cameras in there because it was really frustrating to have these things that kept happening off-camera that were so relevant to our understanding. We were hopeful for a time that we could get cameras in there, but … I mean, you see it a little bit in the movie where I wasn’t excited about doing a re-creation of that final visit. Also, there was a rumor online that I had visited her before. That is bad information. I had never visited her in prison before that one [time] in the film. So, just to clarify that.
Anyway, I was nervous about re-creating that because the earlier re-creations were more about describing what happened in the house and in those early meetings. This one was: I’m asking her questions, and the way she responds and the expression on her face is what would be telling [the audience] about it. I was really skeptical that those things could be captured in a re-creation without it feeling goofy, or just, like, so detached from reality. It was the best we could do given all the constraints on access to her.
But then — and I don’t know if I ever told you this, Amanda — but it wasn’t until I was sitting across from you in those re-creations that I realized how well I understood Liz’s tendencies. Because when anything was slightly off in what you were doing, we would talk about it. It was really like, “This is not how it was.”
Seyfried: You were so specific.
Fielder: But when you got it, it was like, “Wow. This is it. This is what I experienced.” I never thought that would be possible in a re-creation. Really, it’s a testament to your performance. You came in with choices that you were making as a performer, which is great. But sometimes it would be off from what I had witnessed, and so we’d adjust until we got it right, and then it was incredible when you hit it. Even the way you responded to the questions when it was, like, almost nonanswers and certain things, it’s exactly how she answered.
Seyfried: Do you remember when we were in the barn and you were telling me I was doing it wrong? I remember that at one point I’m like, “How was it done, Nathan??”
Oppenheim: There’s an amazing expression on your face where it’s like, “Come on, man, which way is it?”
The performance you’re doing here — even though you’ve done the character before, it feels different than anything else you’ve ever done. I remember being behind the monitor for the final reenactment, and I did feel like I was seeing her. It was startling.
Seyfried: How did you edit together, like, 700 hours of footage? There could have been 1,000 versions of this movie.
“I am sitting there with her children and cuddling with her dog! While she’s in prison! And then she calls!”
Amanda Seyfried
Oppenheim: This happened when we were shooting, but especially when we were in the edit room with Adam Locke-Norton — who’s edited a lot of Nathan’s stuff — we would gravitate toward the moments that we most disagreed on.
Fielder: “Disagreed on” in terms of what we were witnessing.
Oppenheim: Right, the moments that provided the most cognitive dissonance. Our experience watching them would be so different from one another’s, and that felt like a powder keg or something.
Fielder: People are not, you know, normally this difficult for us to make sense of.
Seyfried: Well, normally people answer a question. She doesn’t answer questions.
Oppenheim: She’s like a human optical illusion or something.
Seyfried: A David Blaine trick.
Oppenheim: [Laughs.] Yeah!
Fielder: A couple weeks ago, I asked Adam, “Do you feel that if someone saw all 700 hours, [they] would come away with a different conclusion — or different conclusions — than just watching the three-hour film?” And he said, “Actually, I don’t think so.” I just thought that was so telling that it’s like, wow, it’s not always the more you know about someone, the more you see someone.
Oppenheim: There had already been so much [coverage of] her case. The documentary, the book, the podcast …
Seyfried: Just too much information!
Oppenheim: We wanted to do something that was forward-looking and not just regurgitating stuff that was already in the public record or had been extensively reported on.
Fielder: So, Amanda, when you arrived on the re-creation sets, it seemed like you were curious about what objects were in the real locations versus choices our set decorators or production design team made. Why was that something that interested you?
Seyfried: I think I was just grasping at anything that could ground me back into this world because it had been so long, and I think I was also experiencing some kind of weird, like, meta-vortex because I had just seen Elizabeth Holmes in this house, and the house is so specific …
Oppenheim: Like you’d somehow walked into the documentary.
Seyfried: Yes! That’s it! It’s like if they still had the set of Family Matters up, and I walked onto the set. You become a part of what you’ve experienced in a way that you don’t get to do very often. Nobody had been [in Holmes and Evans’ beach house] for two years or whatever. And suddenly it’s like I’ve time-traveled two years into the past.
Fielder: It felt like you were stepping into our memories, in a way, and we wanted to capture that feeling of memory in the edit. Like [the audience was] transitioning from the first half [of the film] into these re-creations.
Seyfried: The way you shot it, who’s in it, the questions you asked, the way you lived inside this process — people cannot stop talking about it for a reason. So it was that much more intense for me when I walked in, because it was like she had just been there. The first moment — well, besides Billy in the shower — the first moment that stuck out to me when I was watching the footage in my apartment was him grabbing the eggs. You were like, “Feel free to stop whenever you want to ask me a question.” And when the egg moment happened, I immediately hit the space bar [to stop the video], and I was like, “What the fuck?” And you were like—
Fielder: “Yeah! I know!”
Seyfried: So, like, these moments, like, this experience that I had watching it — I’m now in that same space. It’s just crazy. It’s great for an actor. But it’s just weird for me.
Oppenheim: The moment that I’ll probably be thinking about on my deathbed is the dinner scene between you and Billy.
Seyfried: Same!
Oppenheim: What was going on in your head?
Seyfried: I was honestly trying to connect with him. We were all sitting there eating really good Chinese food, and, obviously, there were questions we wanted to ask. But for me, since I’m not an interviewer or an investigator, I’m not so good at asking questions and getting the timing right. And Nathan, you had a rapport with him. I was still creating this rapport. Plus, I’m in this man’s house with his kids. Did I say that earlier?
Oppenheim: You did. But I’m curious. Like when the conversation started to turn … I’m just behind the camera thinking, “What is going on?”
Seyfried: There was no reason for him to get that aggressive. [Pauses.] That’s the word I’m going to use, as it’s more diplomatic. If my jaw wasn’t obviously on the floor, you could tell, like, it had come unhinged. I don’t want to provoke him, but at this point, it’s kind of like, the gloves are off. Because this guy has disrespected me in such a way that I was like, “Oh, I don’t think so, buddy.” I was in the frame of mind where I’m like, “OK, this guy is disrespectful, and I’m here in his home, I’m gonna argue this because I actually have a pretty solid stance on things. I don’t like the way he’s using this human being, his wife — the person he says he’s “building monuments of love” to — as a tool. Maybe he does respect her, but he’s behaving like he does not respect her. And not only am I protective of myself, I’m just trying to set the record straight in a way where I’m trying to defend myself, too, while maintaining some kind of rapport with him, so I can stay and he doesn’t kick us out, you know?
Oppenheim: I don’t have any memory of you saying, like, “Can we cut that out?” or anything like that.
Seyfried: I’m a people pleaser [laughs]. I think a lot of my friends who knew that I was doing this secret project were like, “Are you sure you’re OK? Are you sure you want to keep doing this?” And I was like, “Yeah, it feels like sure … maybe … I don’t know?” There was never a point at which I was just going to be like, “You know what? Let’s not do this.” I did get close to being like, “No reenactments. That just seems weird. That just seems like going back to the well, and it might be dry.” But the truth is, we all kept this idea alive.
I joined you both way later on. But I also feel like each of us has brought something very specific to this project. And when you needed me, I came because of how invested you were, and how I felt like we were all on the same page at a point. We were like a band. We were like a team. It felt like part of the team. And when I felt part of the team, it made me want to go even further. It’s not necessarily about being safe, but about doing something different. And it’s not just about doing something different, but doing something that confuses you and excites you and terrifies you. That’s the shit that we have to remind each other to commit to in order to create something so wild.
Oppenheim: Every time I watch it, I feel so overwhelmed by it all. I not only feel like I’ve been taken back in time to the place where it all happened, but I feel overwhelmed by some moment that I find really funny, or some moments I find extremely sad. To me, it was important to have that range. The more we could express the emotional experience we had with them in making the film, the more I thought the film would be successful at communicating something honest.
Fielder: Amanda, would you ever do something like this again, or do you regret it?
Seyfried: What are you talking about? I don’t regret it at all. I’m having the time of my life right now! I mean, I’m not going to do this again. But neither are you!
Production credits
Fielder and Oppenheim: Grooming by Jennifer Brent at Forward Artists using 111SKIN. Seyfried: Hair by Orlando Pita. Makeup by Genevieve Herr.
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