Truthfully, it’s been superb to have the ability to do one thing that isn’t a comedy. However coming from comedy, I used to be very within the absurdities of the world. As a result of as I discovered extra about Silicon Valley, and the way every part works, it may be an absurd place. And the efficiency facet of her character — the turtleneck and the voice — as anyone who has been in rooms with all males and never understanding what to do with my fingers or my face, I understood that.
Properly, you do have a longstanding curiosity in messy, charismatic ladies. Beneath the turtleneck, perhaps she’s yet another.
MERIWETHER There are a variety of layers and sides and historical past. I felt like folks’s understanding of who she was had been restricted to the deep voice and the turtleneck. I used to be desirous about going deeper, and I felt like Rebecca’s podcast was made with that spirit of wanting to determine what motivated her. It was a very onerous tone to determine. Versus different tales of start-ups which have failed, the stakes for this had been so excessive. This was folks’s well being. This was, in a really primal means, their blood.
Amanda, why did the sequence curiosity you?
SEYFRIED I had been very interested by Elizabeth Holmes. I had, alone, binged every part I might on her. I simply I knew that this was one thing that I used to be going to have the ability to stay with for a very long time and discover in a very new means for myself as an actor, anyone that’s right here with us and residing her life. It felt like going to varsity, this job.
MERIWETHER It was a lot analysis!
SEYFRIED I imply, I purchased a e-book on microfluidics. I sat and I watched and listened to these deposition tapes [related to a 2018 Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit against Holmes, Balwani and Theranos]. I re-listened to “The Dropout.” I listened to [an audiobook version of] “Unhealthy Blood.” I simply didn’t cease, and it by no means obtained previous. I felt like I used to be absorbing her.
In some unspecified time in the future you needed to determine what motivated her. What was it?
SEYFRIED Perception. Our imaginations are wild, if we train them. I selected to only, as this character, imagine in every part. And after I was informed that one thing wasn’t true, I doubled down.