Warning: this story contains You Can See Everything spoilers. Lots of people have been talking about You Can See Everything, a new documentary that follows Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes before she’s sent to prison. One person in particular wasn’t necessarily expected to appear in the film: actress Amanda Seyfried.
Amanda is involved in this story because she previously portrayed Elizabeth in a Hulu miniseries about her. That miniseries, called The Dropout, has been described as fact-based, but still, it’s a dramatization.
Back in 2022, Amanda shared her thoughts on portraying Elizabeth in this miniseries.
Amanda Seyfried says her life right now is “interesting” and “everything that’s happening is meant to happen” at the #AcademyMuseumGala https://t.co/sXvjWrmVjl
— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) October 18, 2026
“I came at it very much as an actor playing here. Then I went to a place of like, ‘OK, I want to get to know this woman. I really want to know what’s going on,'” she said at the time.
She also told Entertainment Weekly, “Playing somebody, you have to want to know where they came from and what they might have been thinking. You have to put away your judgments and your feelings and start fresh — be on their team for a little while. In order to play them well, you need to understand them as much as you can.”
Her portrayal of Elizabeth has sparked a debate online.
Amanda Seyfried on whether she’s kept up with Elizabeth Holmes’ story: “On and off.” https://t.co/MhyyCTZC6M
— Film Updates (@FilmUpdates) October 18, 2026
And some people did not like the way she came across in You Can See Everything. After watching the documentary, some viewers have said Amanda’s portrayal of Elizabeth in The Dropout helped shape the public’s perception of Elizabeth. This has led to a debate about whether she should’ve taken more responsibility for this.
“Amanda takes no responsibility for her role in convincingly depicting Elizabeth in a fictionalized version of the Theranos story,” one person argued on Reddit. “The public at large believes scenes from The Dropout truly occurred for which there are no evidence at all, and Amanda seems to feel she can exculpate herself entirely from this because everyone should know it is fiction.”
Not everyone saw this as a big deal. One person called Amanda “the only normal person in the movie,” while someone else argued that “actors are not at fault when people watch something like the Dropout and don’t grasp that it’s fictionalized.”
Meanwhile, another person said it’s not really about Amanda specifically, but it does seem “fair to ask questions around the ethics of dramatization and the media industry’s consumption of real lives for the sake of profit.”
Some fans have argued Amanda was simply doing her job as an actor.
amanda seyfried portraying holmes like this and then asserting that she did nothing wrong is so tea https://t.co/1SGLzDzOSI
— eric (@powerswitchhh) October 18, 2026
“She’s an actress who played a part as best she could based on the information she had and direction given,” someone wrote in her defense. “She has nothing to defend. She did her job.”
But others think it’s more complicated than that. “Do people really feel that actors have no responsibility in the roles they choose?” another person questioned. “It’s still a choice to misrepresent a real person. People in here are talking like Amanda is just a tool that the writers and director use and she has no say in what she participates in.”
But perhaps the ambiguity is the point. One viewer said they saw Amanda as “a device to blur the lines of reality and fiction” in the documentary. “I felt like she was a stand in for us as the audience,” someone else said of Amanda’s role in it. “And even when she is going through the complex emotions of if it was right to portray Liz, it felt as if it was a reflection of our relationship with true crime.”
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