Amanda Seyfried started filming “You Can See Everything” without telling her agents or signing any deals with her lawyer, the actor revealed in a new interview with Rolling Stone. The Oscar nominee joined directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim for the trio’s first spoiler-filled press interview together now that their documentary has been in theaters for nearly a month and is on its way to crossing $80 million at the domestic box office.
According to Fielder, bringing Seyfried into the fold was an idea that got hatched two years after he shot all of the scenes in the beach house with Elizabeth Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans. The directors were unsure of how to continue the movie and realized how much Seyfried’s Emmy-winning portrayal of Holmes on Hulu’s “The Dropout” remained relevant for people in Holmes’ orbit, including her parents.
“I got your phone number through Emma Stone,” Fielder told Seyfried. “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.”
Seyfried explained: “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.”
The first scenes Seyfried filmed for “You Can See Everything” were her watching all of the footage Fielder had previously shot from inside the beach house, which is how she is introduced about halfway into the documentary.
“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,” Seyfried said. “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.”
“We should clarify that because, yeah, all you’d agreed to was just coming in, and we’d show you the stuff and talk,” Fielder added.
Eventually the conversations with Seyfried pivoted to whether or not she would be interested in playing Holmes again on camera, as Fielder and Oppenheim were interested in recreating some of the initial conversations they had with the real Holmes off camera.
“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,” Fielder explained. “Anything that comes up in those conversations will potentially be part of it. People should know that [Amanda] had no creative control over this project. Anything that was filmed… [Amanda had no approval over anything].”
“No approval. Whatsoever,” Seyfried stressed. “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!’”
The one thing Seyfried knew she wanted to do after seeing all of the footage Fielder and Oppenheim had shot from their time living with Holmes was to meet her partner, Billy Evans. Why? “It felt dangerous. I wanted answers,” Seyfried explained to Rolling Stone. “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.”
Seyfried’s opinion of Evans “only got worse” after they met. As documented in one of the movie’s most unforgettable stretches, Seyfried and Fielder meet Evans at his home and have a confrontational dinner in which Evans insults Seyfried’s acting and the two spar over Seyfried’s criticisms of Charlie Kirk. Prior to the dinner, Seyfried meets Holmes and Evans’ children and the moment gets interrupted by a phone call from Holmes herself from prison.
“We didn’t know she was gonna call right then,” Seyfried told Rolling Stone. “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?’”
As for the confrontational dinner, Seyfried maintains “there was no reason for [Evans] to get that aggressive. 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.”
“This guy has disrespected me in such a way that I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t think so, buddy,’” she said. “I was in the frame of mind where this guy is disrespectful, and I’m here in his home, and 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?”
Head over to Rolling Stone’s website to read Seyfried’s full interview with Fielder and Oppenheim.
