Amanda Seyfried Can Finally Talk About It

Okay, stop reading right here if you don’t want to know the “it” that Amanda Seyfried is talking about. Seriously. We’ve warned you long enough. You’ve had a month to learn why Seyfried isn’t talking about the thing we would maybe want her to be talking about, and why it’s such a big deal that she finally is talking about the thing we want her to be talking about. In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Seyfried sat down with directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim to discuss her showstopping appearance in their Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything, in which she is both active participant, reenactor, and audience member all in one. How did this all happen? Well, through the one and only Emma Stone, who put Fielder and Seyfried in touch to chat about his project so far, which she agreed to do, one scene at a time, sans agents, representatives, or even her legal team at first. “There was no protection. There was no advocate for me. I just felt like I was totally game because I was so invested in what you were doing, and already had this strange level of trust in you guys,” Seyfried explains.

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One of the biggest questions posed by You Can See Everything is the extent to which Seyfried, like Holmes herself, is “being real.” Despite ongoing debates as to whether or not Seyfried is “acting” in her various scene analyses with Fielder, she insists that any time she’s not reenacting, she’s, well, being her unscripted self. “I want people to know that everything that’s outside of the scripted reenactments, like that phone call,” Fielder says, of the time he and Seyfried go to visit Holmes’s husband, Billy Evans, and Holmes calls from the prison, “that’s all coming from you.” Even when things got heated, Seyfried was always herself. “I don’t have any memory of you saying, like, ‘Can we cut that out?’ or anything like that,” Oppenheim corroborates. That means when Seyfried pops off on Evans at the dinner table, that’s really her popping off at Evans at the dinner table. “If my jaw wasn’t obviously on the floor, you could tell, like, it had come unhinged,” she says, describing how aggressive he became when the two disagreed about politics and whether or not it was appropriate for him to be Holmes’s voice on Twitter. Does that make her chances for an Oscar go down? Knowing that what we’re seeing is more her than not her, at least when she’s not reenacting scenes as Holmes? It’s hard to say this early into the season, but it does make all the scenes with Seyfried-as-herself that much funnier and more electric, knowing the extent to which she threw caution to the wind.

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What feels most revealing about Seyfried’s first long-form conversation about You Can See Everything is that her participation helped them all understand Holmes a little bit better, providing a mirror into what Holmes was and wasn’t once she went off to jail. “You came in with choices that you were making as a performer, which is great. But sometimes it would be off from what I had witnessed, and so we’d adjust until we got it right, and then it was incredible when you hit it,” Fielder says of his co-star’s work. “I remember being behind the monitor for the final reenactment, and I did feel like I was seeing her.” For Seyfried, however, the reward is in the risk of it all: doing something that “confuses you and excites you and terrifies you.” Just don’t ask her to do it again.

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