One month before the notorious Theranos CEO surrendered to begin her eleven-year criminal fraud sentence in 2023, Holmes and her husband contacted A24 as a last-ditch effort to exonerate her in the public eye, suggesting they send a film crew to document her final days of freedom. Alongside director Lance Oppenheim, Fielder — a cringe-comedy mastermind whose work often walks the line between fact and fiction — embraced the impossible project of figuring out who the infamous Stanford dropout really is. His satirical docu-reality show “Nathan for You” catapulted him to cult stardom as he assumed the role of an exaggerated, deadpan version of himself who tries to help struggling small business by executing asinine interventions.
In one early episode that went viral, Fielder convinces a coffee shop to change its name to “Dumb Starbucks” as a marketing stunt, but consults a lawyer to help him toe the flimsy line of parody law and escape legal trouble. Maybe it was in bad taste.” We already know that Elizabeth Holmes is not innocent. What we still can’t figure out, though, is whether she really, truly believes it when she says she did nothing wrong.
Even as she sat on trial — listening to testimonies from investors who lost hundreds of millions of dollars, whistleblowers who were silenced when they flagged that Theranos’ blood testing devices didn’t work, and patients who acted on incorrect blood test results — Holmes never wavered. Across Fielder’s body of metatextual comedy, even his most reverent fans can’t quite figure out when he’s acting, when he’s being himself, and if Fielder himself even knows where to draw that line anymore. In that way, Fielder is just like Holmes: after over a decade in the public eye, onlookers remain captivated by each of their ambiguous personas.
And yet, Holmes and her husband, hotel heir Billy Evans, were livid about the article. At one point in an interview, Holmes tells the Times reporter that she wasn’t offended by actress Amanda Seyfried’s portrayal of her in Hulu’s miniseries “The Dropout” because, “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.” She and her husband insist that the quote was taken out of context.
They claim that they have evidence that Holmes actually said, “They’re playing a character they created,” relieving her from any implication that she admitted to concocting an inauthentic persona as CEO of Theranos. Fielder asks Evans multiple times to share this evidence so he can prove that Holmes was misquoted. Once Holmes reports to prison, Fielder is agonized as he tries to make something out of his month of footage.
He calls in the perfect sidekick to help him dissect her confounding behavior: the very actress who portrays her in “The Dropout.” Fielder plays Seyfried a brutal clip from his time with Holmes, when he tries watching “The Dropout” with the subject of the series itself. When they get to a tense scene involving Holmes’ manipulative ex-boyfriend and former Theranos partner-in-crime Sunny Balwani — who is also now in prison — Holmes can no longer bear to watch this fictional version of herself. She turns away and cries.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
