We’re sitting in the Bowery Hotel’s outdoor patio in Lower Manhattan, making small talk about the New York Knicks and life in the city as we gauge who might bring it up first. No one around us recognizes the forty-year-old actor in his washed red button-up and jeans. And they don’t know it yet, but when the movie premieres in a few days, Abbott will make a surprise appearance in Nathan Fielder’s exceptional Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything.
He’s hesitant to say anything, especially in a room full of potential eavesdroppers. Spoilers of any kind in the film industry are to be guarded with your life. Abbott’s already kept his role hidden for more than a year since they filmed.
Eventually, I cave and reveal that I’ve seen the movie already. His part in the new film is impossible to ignore, and if you haven’t seen You Can See Everything yet, here’s your warning that a major spoiler is coming in the next paragraph. The actor appears in the second half of the film—in theaters now—because the director lost all access to his subject after Holmes was sent to prison mid-filming.
So Fielder pulled a familiar trick out of his sleeve. He called in Amanda Seyfried (who won an Emmy Award for playing Holmes in Hulu’s The Dropout) and Abbott to reenact previously unrecorded scenes of Holmes and her equally manipulative partner, Billy Evans, respectively. It’s a transcendent twist.
Watching how the gears turned in Fielder’s mind was simply an opportunity Abbott couldn’t pass up. Because of how long these things take to come out, I don’t know what the world is going to look like then. It might all blow up.” But when I saw the film in a packed, sold-out theater on opening weekend, the audience gasped in delight when the camera panned up to reveal Abbott on screen.
Now The New York Times and others are predicting that You Can See Everything might become the first documentary to receive a nomination among the feature films for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. For Abbott, recognition is new. The actor has long excelled in brooding indie films.
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