How Amanda Seyfried learned to dance like Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu’s TheDropout
“you have to understand the importance of those moments for Elizabeth in which she’s feeling her feelings in this very beautiful, hilarious, heartbreaking kind of way,” she said. “Even if she doesn’t understand it herself.”
For Seyfried, becoming Elizabeth was a full-body experience. She mastered Holmes’ voice—a disconcertingly deep baritone that the Theranos founder reportedly created to appear more authoritative in the boardroom—by scrunching her face in ways she can’t even fully explain. “Someone recently asked me if I was wearing a chin prosthetic,” she said, which she considered “the best compliment” she could get as an actor. “They thought my face looked different enough that it couldn’t just be me.
Yet it was a pair of shoes that ultimately helped Seyfried become Holmes’ facsimile. “The shiny patent leather pointy flats,” she said, which matched a pair Holmes would often wear around the office. Putting them on completely transformed how Seyfried moved her body. “I tucked my hips in and started walking with my hands behind my back, the way Elizabeth does,” she said.
Seyfried has never been the type of actor who can completely disappear into a role. “Anyone who knows me is going to catch a glimpse of me onscreen in,” she admits. But Meriwether’s writing allowed her to find humor and pathos in a character who apologizes to her boyfriend, who is nearly 20 years her senior, by performing an off-putting little dance torather than saying she’s sorry.