‘The Dropout’: Amanda Seyfried, Elizabeth Meriwether Explain Finale

SPOILER ALERT: This piece contains spoilers for “Lizzy,” the finale of “The Dropout,” which premiered April 7 Hulu.

When Elizabeth Meriwether was first planning “The Dropout” — her Hulu adaptation of the popular ABC News podcast of the same name, which chronicled the spectacular rise and precipitous fall of Theranos founder, Elizabeth Holmes — she an idea about where she wanted the story to end: Burning Man. “It seemed like an interesting place for a kind of quote-unquote rebirth, you know?” Meriwether said.

She could picture Elizabeth, played by Amanda Seyfried, along with her mysterious new boyfriend Billy Evans, as Burners frolicking in the desert without a care in the world. After all, in August 2018, images of the couple at the annual late-summer festival had emerged on social media: In a viral photograph, Holmes can be seen in a T-shirt and fur-collared jacket, wearing hot pink sunglasses and a blissed-out grin. Gone was the Steve Jobs-ian uniform — a black turtleneck and black pants — from her Theranos years.

Meriwether paused, and then laughed: “And then COVID happened, and I still hadn’t written it.”

“I feel like I put off writing the finale so long, because I was just like, I can’t,” she continued. “It felt like this mountain I had to climb; it was admitting that it was over. But yeah, then it was just like, ‘OK, Burning Man is not a feasible thing for us to do.’”

If you’ve watched “Lizzy,” the finale of “The Dropout,” you know what Meriwether, who wrote the episode from a story by her and Sofya Levitsky-Weitz, did instead — an ending that’s detailed extensively below.

This final episode would prove to be a test for Seyfried as well, and she cited something her co-star on “The Dropout,” William H. Macy, had told her: “Our responsibility is to our character.” For Seyfried, as Elizabeth’s circumstances became dire, “the ease of the relationship” with the character became “more of a challenge.”

“I want to believe until the very bitter end — I’d still want to believe — that her intentions were good in the beginning,” she said. (The real Holmes is currently awaiting sentencing of up to 20 years in a federal prison, after being convicted in January of four counts of fraud.)

At the start of “Lizzy,” a frantic Elizabeth is trying to rally the company’s board of directors back to her side, after The Wall Street Journal has published a devastating investigation into Theranos by John Carreyrou (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). The 2015 story exposed Theranos’ fraudulent claims about its blood-testing technology, revealed that the company was using third-party machines to process patient samples, and that it would often come up with incorrect results that adversely affected real people’s lives.

It was the beginning of the end for Theranos, but at the start of the episode, Elizabeth isn’t ready to give up. “Everything they have written about us is false,” she says in a montage that also sees her also claiming the story is sexist, and warming up like an athlete. In the next office, Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), Elizabeth’s boyfriend and Theranos’ COO, is having less success putting on a happy face, as he slams the phone down. But convincing people, as we’ve seen on “The Dropout,” is Elizabeth Holmes’ superpower.

At what cost, though, Seyfried wonders? “As desperate as I was as Amanda to believe she still believes, I was losing trust, rapidly. And I had to make sure that you weren’t seeing that. By the end, it’s just like, ‘What are you holding on to?’”

Of the multiple ripped-from-the-headlines scam dramas to premiere this year — from “WeCrashed” to “Inventing Anna” — “The Dropout” has stood out from the pack, garnering rave reviews for Seyfried’s performance and for how Meriwether structured the story of Holmes, mixing its requisite dramatic elements with laugh-out-loud comedic moments.

During a recent interview with Seyfried and Meriwether together, “The whole thing has been a fucking joy to discuss,” Seyfried pronounced. It was a sentiment that would prove to be borne out the conversation, in which they broke down the finale.

Elizabeth and Sunny turn on each other: “It’s romantic to look over old texts.” 

Pressure has been mounting on Theranos since the Journal story broke, but the true death blow to the company will soon be dealt by a less glamorous mechanism. Erika Cheung (Camryn Mi-young Kim) — a former lab assistant who once worshiped Elizabeth, but has since turned into a terrified, yet stalwart, whistleblower — reports Theranos to the Center of Medicare and Medicaid Services in order to “shut her ass down,” as Erika says to fellow traveler, Tyler Shultz (Dylan Minnette). And shutting Elizabeth’s ass down — in the most banal, bureaucratic way possible — is exactly what the agency does.

When constructing the season, Meriwether says she knew she wanted to credit Cheung’s crucial role the downfall of Theranos: that it was Cheung’s letter to CMS that brought about the end. “I felt like Erika Cheung’s role in actually stopping the laboratories wasn’t as well known,” Meriwether said.

In early 2016, Elizabeth and Sunny are at the office when they receive the calamitous news about the audit. Though they’re still together, they’ve become increasingly wary of one another — and in this scene, they jab and parry as they alternately unravel and try to save themselves. Every line is layered, as Sunny reminisces about them meeting in Beijing, while adding that he’s been going through their old correspondence. When he admits he’s been talking to a lawyer, Elizabeth turns viperous. “Do you think that we did something wrong?” she asks. “Or did you do something that I didn’t know about?” They snipe at each other, with him telling her he worked to achieve “your dream, your passion, not mine,” and her saying things back like, “How old was I when I met you? I was barely 18.”

By the end of the scene, they seem physically to have come back together, with her head resting on his thigh. Which is when Sunny says softly: “But where will you live? The house is in my name.”

Seyfried remembers having a physical reaction when she first read the scene. “It made me shudder — Are you kidding me?” she recalls thinking. Addressing Meriwether, Seyfried said, “You took the tension of all these years and you put it in one scene — like, it had to make your hair stand on end.”

She described how director Erica Watson used the cameras to capture the back and forth. “I’d never seen cameras move the way they moved in that room,” Seyfried said. “They were like other people in the room.” She wanted to show that Elizabeth was both threatening Sunny and feeling under attack herself: “The most interesting thing to me is when you’re holding two things at the same time in any scene.”

Meriwether was on set that night, she said, watching the two actors duel. “On one hand, she seems to believe what she’s saying,” she said of Elizabeth — but also “you really know that she’s playing her last card.”

About dramatizing the core relationship of “The Dropout,” Elizabeth and Sunny, with its shifting allegiances, Meriwether said: “I was just so fascinated by their relationship throughout the process. And it was also the hardest thing to write, because we have the least information about it.”

With Sunny’s final dig, he was playing his “very last card” as Meriwether calls it: his wealth.

And for Seyfried, “It’s very delicious, that moment.”

She continued: “Their egos were so giant at that point that it’s just really fun to watch them pass the ball back and forth. And she just doesn’t expect — like, it’s hard to get her: and he gets her. It solidifies why they’re together. He can one-up her at the last second in some way that most people wouldn’t even try.”

“OK, bye.”

After waking up on his office floor, Sunny finds out from a board member that he’s stepped down as COO — which is news to him. “It’s the right thing for Elizabeth,” the board member tells him.

He rushes home, where he finds Elizabeth hurriedly packing her things, a sight that causes him finally to lose it. After calling her a “bitch,” Sunny unleashes. “Oh my god, there’s nothing there,” he says, as she picks up her things to leave. “There’s nothing inside you. I invented you inside my head. For 12 years, I’ve been inventing you — I made you up!” He begins chasing her down the stairs, still yelling. “You’re not real! You don’t have feelings! You aren’t a person, you’re a ghost! You’re nothing, you’re nothing, you’re not real!”

Now outside, with Elizabeth’s Tesla in the driveway, Sunny growls. “You’re nothing.” Finally, she turns to face him: “And you’re a mediocre software engineer.” He grabs the box out of her arms, and throws it on the ground. She barely flinches, and says flatly, “OK, bye.” She heads to her car.

But Sunny knows what’s coming for them, even if Elizabeth doesn’t. “You have no idea what’s about to happen,” he tells her, his fury having passed. She asks him, “And what are you going to say?” He replies, with a softness in his voice, “I won’t hurt you.” She looks at him, and her eyes fill with tears — she backs out of the driveway.

Filming the scene was incredibly physical, Seyfried said — but not as exhausting as her dancing scene in Episode 2 “when I could not move the next day,” she said with a laugh. Elizabeth and Sunny’s break-up, set in their architectural mansion, had to be highly choreographed, with “the Steadicam guy walking backwards downstairs very quickly,” Seyfried said, “so there’s a lot of technical stuff that you have to be aware of.” But the scene “moves in a way that your emotions kind of are helped by the physicality of it,” she said.

“It takes a second to get there, and once you’re there, it’s like theater. You’ve memorized the movements. And now you can go full-throttle with the emotions.”

Meriwether faced a different type of challenge as she wrote their final confrontation. “I was so nervous about that scene,” she said. “I was so afraid of making it feel too melodramatic. But I also just felt like this was the moment when you really had to feel like it was the end of the opera. Right? I felt like I kind of had to go for it.”

As for Sunny’s speech about Elizabeth, she said it was his “ego blinding him for years as to what was actually going on inside the person he claimed to love.” And even during his newfound revelation, Meriwether said, “He sees this version of her in his head that is again not totally right.”

Asked about her ice-cold delivery of “OK, bye,” Seyfried repeated the line for effect, and said: “It just seems like, what’s the worst way you can say that to somebody? Like the most demeaning?”

Having dissed Sunny, she then had to switch gears to mourning the relationship, right before she leaves him for good. “That was the end of something she felt incredibly safe in — in a really, really, really deep way,” Seyfried said. “She’s, like, all alone at that moment. And he says, ‘I won’t hurt you.’ Knowing that they’re done, and also knowing that he loved her in his way, and she’s losing that.

“Because that was the rawest thing. You know, he can penetrate her!”

Holmes alleged in her trial testimony that Balwani had been abusive toward her, which he denies, and “The Dropout” does show Sunny being physically aggressive with Elizabeth in its third episode. But Meriwether had to tread carefully with how she depicted their dynamic. “I guess I always understood it to be a toxic relationship. And I wanted to show that as much as I could — legally, actually,” she said. “I wanted to get the heart of our characters, like what that relationship meant to our characters. As I’ve said a lot before, this is a dramatization. And I still think that more information could come out.”

Though Holmes has been convicted on four (of 11) charges, and will be sentenced in September, Balwani’s trial has just begun. There’s still so much we don’t know.

For Meriwether, though, her fears about the scene being too much were assuaged by the actors’ performance.

“I was really scared of going over the top, and I just though both Naveen and Amanda found the emotional grounding in it.”

After Elizabeth flames out on “Today,” we get a peek at her future self

In a last-ditch effort to save the company and her reputation, Elizabeth goes on “Today,” and is instructed by Theranos’ in-house counsel Linda (Michaela Watkins) to seem “ashamed” at the company’s mistakes, and to “go, be yourself.” But since Elizabeth has no self to be, she freezes — and the TV appearance is catastrophic. As her mother (Elizabeth Marvel) tries to comfort her afterward, Elizabeth weaponizes her mother’s advice to her after she’d been raped at Stanford. “You told me to just put it away and forget it,” Elizabeth snaps. “If you choose to forget certain things, do you think that’s lying?” Her mother scurries away, and Elizabeth sheds her uniform, taking her hair down and violently yanking off her black turtleneck. She pants, seemingly able to breathe for the first time in awhile, smiles, and looks into the mirror.

The scene suddenly switches, as a voice whispers: “Lizzy. Lizzy.” Elizabeth opens her eyes —she’s in bed with a young man we see only in glimpses. They say “I love you” to each other, and then the setting shifts again, this time to the Holmes deposition “The Dropout” has shown throughout the series in grainy, interstitial snippets. This time, the cameras are in the conference room where the deposition — conducted by lawyers for the Securities and Exchange Commission — is happening.

The two scenes cut back and forth, with Elizabeth’s bed companion — played by Garrett Coffey, and clearly modeled after the aforementioned Billy Evans, Holmes’ hotel-heir partner with whom she has a child — describing Burning Man, complimenting her beauty and telling her she looks “like a Lizzy.” “I do?” she asks, through her sex haze. Back in the conference room, Elizabeth’s standard answer is that she doesn’t remember most things she did at Theranos — after all, if she chooses to forget, does that mean she’s lying? (In real life, her variations on “I don’t know” more than 600 times became infamous on the internet.)

As the deposition continues onscreen, the SEC lawyer also asks Elizabeth when her last contact with Sunny was. She says they had passed each other while they were both running, said hello — “and that was it.”

That anecdote — of Elizabeth and Sunny just happening to bump into each other while running — was taken straight from Holmes’ deposition, Meriwether said. And it was something she not only considered writing into the script, but “it was actually another idea for the end of the series.” (“Interesting!” Seyfried chimed in.) In Meriwether’s conception of it, Elizabeth would have been jogging in a park with her adopted dog, Balto — who, according to a February 2019 Vanity Fair story, Holmes liked to claim was a wolf — when she ran into Sunny. But in the end, she changed her mind, deciding to was more “interesting to me watching her recount that encounter.”

“I just felt like the actual scene maybe wouldn’t have been as interesting as her describing it in a deposition,” Meriwether said.

It’s just as well, perhaps, because Seyfried doubts its veracity in the first place: “I don’t really think it happened either.”

Based on…?

“I don’t know!” Seyfried said. “I don’t think that’s how it happened. I just don’t. I just have a feeling, when I watched it over and over again.”

Meriwether sounded intrigued by this theory: “You definitely feel like there’s like something that she didn’t say, you know?”

Seyfried continued: “I’m sorry, but I don’t think he went walking in the park. Like, sorry! I just think it’s bullshit.”

In terms of what did make it into the show, the device of revealing Billy’s existence and how Elizabeth would quickly create a new life for herself, “was definitely difficult structurally to figure out,” Meriwether said. She knew she didn’t want to see the two of them meet, and with Sunny as such a pivotal character, “how much does the audience want to see of Billy?”

“At some point when I was working on it, I realized I wanted to highlight the idea of memory,” Meriwether said. “If you’re starting over again, you’re kind of wiping your brain clean — like, wiping a clean slate in what you even remember about yourself.

“Something about that felt like that was coming off of this new identity she had with Billy.”

That new identity Elizabeth has with Billy? Linda does not approve.

In the deserted Theranos office, with her new dog at her side — let’s call him Balto — Elizabeth is being observed by a simmering Linda as she gathers her remaining stuff. “Rupert Murdoch sold all of his shares for a dollar. So you should start plans for bankruptcy,” Linda advises Elizabeth, who inexplicably appears to be cheerful as she plays with the dog. She’s also gone from her all-black uniform to its opposite: a loose fitting, V-neck white T-shirt. An embittered Linda, meanwhile, points out that she’s looking for a new job, but, “No one will hire me.” After a beat, Linda says: “You seem happy. Are you happy?”

“Can I tell you a secret?” Elizabeth asks. Linda demurs, considering to whom she’s speaking, but Elizabeth keeps going. “I have a boyfriend, his name is Billy. I have a picture, here, let me show you” — she grabs her bag, ignoring that Linda does not want to see it. “He’s young, he’s in his 20s.”

“That must be different for you,” Linda says, knifing Elizabeth, whose face falls. “Because Sunny’s so much older.” Linda blinks, looking straight at Elizabeth. “I can’t believe I didn’t know. You guys are such good liars.” Elizabeth moves to leave, and once again, she finds herself being pursued by someone who wants to tell her things she doesn’t want to hear. “I’m just taking a moment to enjoy myself and have fun,” Elizabeth says. Linda is letting loose now, spitting truths: “I mean, you’re legally barred from running a company for the next 10 years, so yeah, I guess it makes sense: Get a dog and a boyfriend, and just have fun!”

With every reply from Elizabeth — about how the healthcare industry wasn’t ready, etc. — Linda ratchets up her own response, finally asking Elizabeth what we all want to know: “Is there something wrong with you?”

“I failed to deliver,” Elizabeth says to Linda. “I failed. But failure is not a crime.” She turns away, but Linda isn’t done. “You hurt people. You hurt people! I worked here, so I have to live with that somehow. But I’m not sure you understand. You must, right? Because I think people have hurt you, right?” Elizabeth is walking briskly with the dog now, rushing down the once-impressively grand stairway that leads up from the Theranos lobby. As she puts in her AirPods, Linda shouts: “Elizabeth! You hurt people!” Elizabeth bursts through the doors, now running away from Linda —and from Theranos.

“I mean, essentially Linda is me in that moment,” Meriwether said with a laugh, while adding that Watkins’ performance is “incredible.” For the specific dialogue, according to Meriwether, Holmes had appeared at a conference as things were falling apart: “And as she was leaving the stage, somebody yelled out, ‘You hurt people!’ And I remembered that, and that phrase felt so important to me as just this distillation of what she didn’t understand.”

Meriwether added the line about “failure” late in the show’s production — because it came from Holmes’ trial. “It felt like the first time she said that she failed,” Meriwether said, although ultimately the self-serving context illustrates “the way that she has justified some things in her head.”

For Seyfried, “it’s my favorite thing,” she said, having Elizabeth be so “clueless about what what’s happening — it’s almost like she refuses any reality.” They emphasized how awkward both of the characters felt during the scene, especially with how distracted Elizabeth is in her new state of apparent blissful happiness. “She’s just bulldozing completely at this point,” Seyfried said. “She’s clearly committed to a new idea and a new path, and you see such a fire under her ass.

“But she’s never been challenged like this, the whole show — the audience is just speaking through Linda, like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ And I don’t know, I thought that was — it was really fun.”

Seyfried was aware that in order to have the fun of playing the remote, self-protective and self-justifying Elizabeth Holmes, she had to “disconnect from the facts that this really happened.”

“It’s weird territory when you’re playing a real person who did fucking real things that were not good,” she said.

The scream — and an Uber.

Having run to the street breathlessly, a finally destabilized Elizabeth stops on the sidewalk to summon an Uber. With her dog by her side, she looks into the distance as her arms, tightly by her side, begin to shake. Her chin trembling, she can’t hold it in any longer: Elizabeth screams at the top of her lungs. She breathes, and then turns toward the Theranos building and screams again. She sinks to the ground. Which is where she is when the Uber pulls up to the curb.

Performing the scream, Seyfried said, was “terrifying,” but “so necessary.”

“I didn’t know how it was going to look, or how it was going to come across,” she continued. “So I just had to feel like I was ripping my insides out. I felt like I did a few takes of that, and then I was like, ‘I’m really tired.’”

At a certain point, Seyfried said, the dog performer “was getting really freaked out” from her screams: “That dog laid down, and put his ears down. And the animal handlers were, like, ‘OK, I think that’s enough!’”

With the dog out of frame, she continued filming. “What do you do with an all-encompassing freak-out?” she said. “Like, a purge of energy like that? For someone who’s been hanging on for so long.”

Meriwether addressed Seyfried, saying: “You knew that you wanted to fall to the ground. And I remember you talking to me about that, and it’s so perfect because, you know, Elizabeth’s physicality is so stiff, and kind of always composed and polished.”

Seyfried responded: “There was a risk of looking too melodramatic, though, you know? But there was also, like, beauty in that she would become really small for a minute, and tuck into herself. And it also felt natural to do that? But I don’t know.”

“It’s always hard to end things, right?” Seyfried added. “I’ve never done a show like this. And we have so many hours with these people. And we know where we are in real life. But, like, how do you tie it in a bow? You can’t. But you can show something cathartic for the audience.”

As the Uber arrives, Elizabeth summons a bright smile — never mind that she’d just had a terrifying breakdown. The driver grins at her, and says, “Are you Lizzy?” In a girlish voice from her upper register, Elizabeth looks at him and responds, “Hi, yeah, I’m Lizzy! Hello!” Ready to laugh again, she heads into the car as the screen turns black, and the audience is given updates on what’s happened to Holmes since — beginning with her 2018 trip to Burning Man with Evans.

Seyfried modulated Holmes’ famous voice throughout “The Dropout,” depending on “where she is, and what she’s doing, and who she’s speaking to,” but she’s self-flagellating about how she played it in the finale. “Oof — I wish I could tell you I was clocking it more.” She did purposefully speak differently to the Uber driver in order to be “more connected to free Lizzy,” and “the reimagined Elizabeth — the new version.”

Meriwether waved away Seyfried’s insecurities about her performance, and described how complicated the final setpiece was to film. “There’s a dog, there’s a walk-and-talk, we’re losing the light, they’re having to walk all the way across this huge space doing a really emotional scene — it’s just that moment where you’re in awe of actors,” she said. “They did it, I think, in like two takes or something, which was truly amazing.”

For Meriwether, “I wanted to show her reinvention, and the idea that she was going to keep going — but as somebody else. I kind of liked that it wasn’t in some big, dramatic way — that it was just an Uber driver. I guess I wanted to show how easy it is sometimes to kind of become a new person.”

Having once planned to set the show’s final scene at Burning Man, Meriwether “realized that I could get the same thing across with just Amanda and an Uber driver.”

And the choice of Uber was purposeful. “It’s passing the baton to the actual successful startup,” Seyfried said. Meriwether agreed: “I felt like she was mad that Uber was there on her phone, as she was standing in front of her empty building.”

The story of “The Dropout” is over, of course, but when asked whether they might collaborate again, Meriwether said “I would love to write something else” for Seyfried.

Seyfried, however, isn’t necessarily ready to let go of Elizabeth Holmes. And when it was pointed out that the sentencing is coming up, and perhaps there could be a coda to the story, Seyfried sounded ready. “Exactly,” she said.

Meriwether joined in: “A Christmas special!”

“I’m not kidding, a two-hour special,” Seyfried said. “Come on!”