Bonus: Amanda and The Other Liz

August 11, 2022·46 min·3 clips

Amanda Seyfried says it felt “bizarre” to film Theranos scenes while Holmes and Balwani were still facing trial.

1. The Dropout bonus episode centers on Amanda Seyfried and Liz Merriweather discussing the Hulu limited series built from the podcast after Elizabeth Holmes’s conviction and Sonny Balwani’s guilty verdict. 2. Amanda Seyfried is the actor nominated for Outstanding Lead Actress, and Liz Merriweather is the creator-showrunner nominated for Outstanding Writing, which is why their perspectives matter here. 3. Rebecca Jarvis uses the conversation to ask what drew them to Elizabeth Holmes, what scared them, and how they tried to get the adaptation right. 4. Amanda says she had to portray “a hybrid” between the real Elizabeth Holmes and the version written for the series. 5. She says it helped to remember that the show was “our version” and that her job was to serve the audience rather than Holmes’s feelings. 6. Liz says she was intimidated because she had only written comedy and had never worked on a Hulu dramatic limited series. 7. Liz says the podcast gave her access to “her mind” in a way other reporting had not, and that fictional storytelling could explore the emotional side. 8. She also points to the business side, the engineering, and the Sonny-Elizabeth relationship as areas that felt hard to write because there was so little public information. 9. Amanda says she drew on uncomfortable parts of her younger self and on people from her past who were awkward in their own skin. 10. Liz says she drew from her own experience running New Girl in her twenties and having power without much experience. 11. Liz says her process is to “hate on myself as much as possible” until she feels raw enough to restart. 12. Amanda says she looks for work that scares her because otherwise “there’s really no point.” 13. Liz says the Sonny-Elizabeth relationship was especially hard because she feared clichés, stereotypes, and melodrama. 14. Amanda says reading Holmes and Balwani’s text messages while the real trial was happening created a strange mix of guilt, distance, and empathy. 15. Liz says the later episodes were hardest because Elizabeth starts making “the wrong choices” and self-destructing choices. 16. Amanda says the fifth episode and the scenes around Ian Gibbons’s suicide were difficult because she had to keep finding the trauma behind Elizabeth’s actions. 17. The conversation sounds loose and self-aware, with Rebecca, Amanda, and Liz repeatedly interrupting themselves, laughing, and circling back to the same ideas. 18. The format is an interview that moves from craft and character work into set stories, memories, and examples from filming. 19. Anyone curious about acting choices, TV writing, or The Dropout’s making process will get a lot from this. 20. Listeners wanting a tight investigative recap without behind-the-scenes chat may skip it.

As heard by us

A sharp bonus conversation about turning Elizabeth Holmes from true crime subject into television character.

The Dropout turns from verdicts and sentencing dates to the stranger work of dramatizing Elizabeth Holmes. Rebecca Jarvis brings Amanda Seyfried and showrunner Liz Merriweather into a bonus conversation about fear, obsession, and the pressure of making a convicted fraud figure…

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Hear how The Dropout moved from podcast to Hulu from the people who helped shape it.

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