Have you seen You Can See Everything? The film, which was co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Primetime director Lance Oppenheim, is creating buzz for a few reasons. First, the general public did not know the film existed before it premiered at Telluride Film Festival. Second, both the documentarian Fielder and his subject Elizabeth Holmes are fascinating human beings for very different reasons. It’s a narrative match we didn’t know we needed. And there’s this spoiler, this one thing that everybody wants to talk about, but Nathan wanted Telluride and subsequent festival audiences to preserve the experience. We’re going to talk about the mystery person in You Can See Everything, and explain what can be explained.
Spoilers for You Can See Everything ahead! Seriously, try and watch it first if you can. The execution makes the film worth watching even if you happened to get spoiled on this particular thing, but know that if you keep reading it is because you made that choice. Avert your eyes and exit if you don’t want that! Because what you hopefully did not get spoiled before seeing the film is that actress Amanda Seyfried, who won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for portraying Holmes in the 2022 Hulu limited series The Dropout, not only appears in You Can See Everything as herself but becomes an audience surrogate, critic, and participant wrapped up in one.
What is [REDACTED]’s role in You Can See Everything?
Fielder visits the actress at several points during the second half of the film, after Holmes herself has been incarcerated in Texas. They meet both at her New York City apartment as well as her farm upstate. At first, Fielder simply shows Seyfried the footage he has so far to get her reaction. He asks a few questions about the research that went into making The Dropout, how she prepared to play Holmes, and whether she considers the limited series to be a work of fiction. She does.
Seyfried then reenacts several unrecorded conversations Fielder had with Holmes before filming began, or after she was behind bars. While other crew members were present in some cases, Fielder transcribed scripts from his own memory. As Seyfried points out, they could have been edited to paint Holmes in a more sympathetic light. Christopher Abbott, who played the husband of Seyfried’s character in The Testament of Ann Lee, plays Holmes’ husband Billy Evans in a few reenactments.
If you’ve seen The Rehearsal you can maybe see why this method was appealing to Fielder as a filmmaker, an artist, and an... I don’t know... investigator? Amateur psychologist? Student of the world? He is no stranger to recreating conversations as verbatim as possible, or playing a facsimile of himself. He’s able to put Seyfried in a fairly unique position as an actress. This is not actually reprising a role, is it? She played a fictionalized version of a real person on screen, saying lines written by Liz Merriweather and a writer’s room, and now gets to play the “real” version.
But is it real, especially if Holmes is lying to Fielder? What is real? Are we not all performing, all of the time? An intro to physics and/or media studies class will teach you about “the observer effect,” i.e. that the act of observation itself tampers with reality. This is the stuff of academic dreams, and right up Fielder’s meta alley.
When did this part of You Can See Everything actually happen?
Fielder stayed with Holmes and her family to document them in spring of 2023, just over a month before Holmes surrendered and began her prison sentence. He resumed filming two years later, and that’s where and when Seyfried comes into play.
As she gets invested in Fielder’s project, Seyfried actually goes with him to meet the real Evans, and his and Holmes’ two children, in a mostly unsuccessful attempt to disarm the husband into revealing information. At that meeting, Evans implies that it has been about 900 days since Holmes’ incarceration, placing it in/around November of 2025. Seyfried would have been beginning press for both The Housemaid and The Testament of Ann Lee at that time.
Why did she contradict herself in You Can See Everything?
At one point, the actress insists that The Dropout is (heavily researched) fiction. It does not matter if Holmes actually said the lines in the show, she says, because she actually behaved in a way that supported those lines. Later, she kind of brags about how so many people think The Dropout was a documentary. When Evans unexpectedly puts Holmes on speakerphone in front of Seyfried, the actress anxiously apologizes for taking time away from her children and blurts out “you’re amazing.” She tells Fielder early on that during the making of The Dropout, contact with Holmes was verboten. So that was the first, and only, time they have spoken.
But the moment Evans leaves the room, Seyfried is suspicious of everyone’s motives again. Then, at the end of the film, after reading that Holmes accused her of making her life harder in prison, Seyfried defends herself and the show by saying they were just making television. She holds the line that Holmes is incarcerated because of her own actions, and wonders to what extent Fielder has been manipulated by her.
Why isn’t she consistent? Probably because she is a human being with empathy. Since Seyfried has not been convicted of a crime, I don’t think we need to be concerned by her complicated feelings about a person she portrayed. Multiple things can be true at once. Are you not also a little conflicted after watching the film?
Seyfried is one of at least three people in the film, along with Evans and Fielder, who claim they don’t want to speak for Holmes and then do it anyway. We are all hypocritical, messy, morally grey beings. That’s what makes this film so good. Now it’s in the audience’s hands to unpack, debate and infuse with our own truth.
What happened to her after You Can See Everything?
She was nominated for a Golden Globe and snubbed for an Oscar. She made the a cappella movie musical Octet. She got divorced, or rather the press learned that she got divorced. Is that what you’re asking about? Probably not, right?
Since her large role in Fielder’s film has been kept under wraps, neither has spoken about it in interviews. At the Toronto International Film Festival, Seyfried denied to Entertainment Tonight that she was involved altogether—obviously not true.
At the red carpet for the Academy Museum Gala on the weekend of the film’s release, reporters tried to ask without asking. The Hollywood Reporter’s awkward interaction, which you can watch on Instagram, concluded by asking how Seyfried would like people to engage with her. On the unspoken assumption that she cannot talk about You Can See Everything, THR asked what she would like to talk about.
“I like to talk about the emus,” Seyfried replied. “I like to talk about Halloween. And you can engage with me if you want to talk about all things having to do with apple pie and olives and really good hard ciders.”
When speaking with Variety on the same carpet, she wagged her finger and warned the reporter not to ask her anything. Hopefully, as more people see You Can See Everything we’ll learn more about the film’s surprise tetartagonist—a word that means “fourth main character” that, yes, I Googled just for this sentence. When was she first contacted? How does she feel about Holmes now? Did it hurt to have to mispronounce her own name in a scene? We don’t know! I’ll take any additional insight, at this point. Maybe she could do an Actors on Actors with Primetime’s Robert Pattinson. Just a suggestion!