(This story contains spoilers from You can see everything.)
Amanda Seyfried is finally… Really — speaking about his involvement in the Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim documentary, You can see everythingincluding why she feared the project could have a negative impact on her career and her tense confrontation with Elizabeth Holmes’ husband Billy Evans.
Following the release of the A24 film nearly a month ago, Seyfried has largely avoided directly addressing his surprise appearance in You can see everything. In the film’s third act, she reprises her portrayal of Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos, whom she played in the limited series. The dropout – a role that won him an Emmy in 2022.
In a new interview with rolling stone Posted Wednesday, Seyfried, Fielder and Oppenheim discuss full spoilers for the film for the first time, including how the actress got involved with the project and her experience with Evans.
While filming the documentary, which chronicles Holmes’ life in the month before his prison sentence, Fielder and Oppenheim began thinking about how to continue the film. That’s when they came up with the idea to involve Seyfried in the project. Fielder obtained the actress’s phone number through his The curse co-star Emma Stone, and the pair eventually connected via Zoom, where he showed her footage from the film.
“I remember when (Emma) texted and I was like, ‘Nathan Fielder? Ooh, I wonder if he wants to do 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 had only seen The Curse. When you said you had 90 minutes of footage to watch and help you work through, I was like, “Oh, he just wants advice.” He just wants us to know my experience playing her, researching her and getting into the mind of this quote-unquote character that I played,” the actress recalls. “After the Zoom, I was totally ready to do whatever you needed. It was just your energy (that convinced me) and the time you spent (on this project) and no one knew it was happening.
Seyfried said she wasn’t initially nervous about joining the project because she already had a “weird level of trust” with Fielder and Oppenheim. However, she acknowledged that agreeing to participate without first consulting her representatives was not the usual process.
“I would say there was a lot of risk in my head, and then when I told my agent and my lawyer that I had already done it? It wasn’t the normal process,” she said. “But I go off to do my own thing sometimes, and no one has any say or control over what I was doing with Nathan and Lance. My lawyer said to me, ‘Well, now we have to implement your agreement retroactively because you need protection.'” At that point, we weren’t even considering reconstitution.
Seyfried ultimately returned to her portrayal of Holmes through “muscle memory,” but the actress also worried about the potential professional consequences of participating in the documentary. Fielder stressed that she had no creative control over the project or the footage filmed.
“No approval. It doesn’t matter,” she said. “There was always this vibration of risk and this feeling of: Am I going to destroy my career in some way? Am I going to get entangled in this kind of hornet’s nest with Billy? Am I going to say the wrong thing? Am I going to perpetuate negativity for her? It was all scary.”
Seyfried also explained why she wanted to meet Evans after watching footage of her interactions with Holmes and the filmmakers.
“It was dangerous. I wanted answers. We all needed to understand who was pulling the strings. What he was doing and how he was behaving in the footage I saw, how you were interacting – it seemed disgusting to me,” she said. “I just wanted all the information I could get on Billy. I became this strange Billy detective because I had felt very 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.”
His opinion of Evans, however, “only got worse” after they met. “I don’t like him,” she said.
The actress also met Holmes and Evans’ children during the documentary, in a scene interrupted by a phone call from Holmes herself, who was calling from prison. Seyfried recalled that the filmmakers didn’t expect the call to come in at that time, adding that it was really Holmes on the other end of the line.
Oppenheim also highlighted the tense dinner scene between Seyfried, Fielder and Evans, during which Evans criticizes the actress’ performance and they argue over Seyfried’s criticism of the late Charlie Kirk.
“The moment I’ll probably think about on my deathbed is the dinner scene between you and Billy,” Oppenheim said.
“There was no reason for him to become so aggressive,” Seyfried said. “That’s the word I’m going to use, because it’s more diplomatic. If my jaw wasn’t visibly on the floor, you could say it was out of whack. I don’t want to provoke him, but at this point it’s kind of like I took the gloves off. Because this guy was so disrespectful to me that I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t think so, buddy.’
She continued, “I don’t like the way he uses this human being, his wife – the person he says he ‘builds monuments of love’ to – as a tool. Maybe he respects her, but he behaves like he doesn’t respect her. And not only am I protecting myself, I’m just trying to set the record straight by trying to defend myself too, while maintaining some sort of relationship with him, so that I can stay and he Don’t kick us out, you know?
Despite her concerns about the project, Seyfried said she has no regrets about taking part: “I don’t regret it at all. I’m having the time of my life right now!”
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