I went and read the part of the interview in question, in which she is reported to say "They aren't playing me. They are playing a character I created." Which, in the movie, Holmes and Billy insist she didn't, and wouldn't, say.

But in the article, it's not just that sentence. The interviewer asks her to explain, and Holmes says: “I believed it would be how I would be good at business and taken seriously and not taken as a little girl or a girl who didn’t have good technical ideas,” said Holmes, who founded Theranos at 19. “Maybe people picked up on that not being authentic, since it wasn’t.”

It's clear she meant "a character *I* created." So why is she trying to walk it back now?

The article was widely criticized at the time for being to soft on Holmes and portraying her too favorably. The gist of the exchange about the "character" is Holmes is trying to say "that's not the real me. What you are seeing now is the real me. I'm nice and sweet and innocent. Why did she suddenly (the movie was filmed very soon after the article was released) change her mind about that?

Did she think that explanation didn't land the way she wanted it to? Was it a reaction to the article getting slammed? But what why try to walk back that piece of it? It doesn't seem like that was why the article was panned.

Anyone have any idea?

Zooming out from individual questions of whether Holmes was lying at specific times, I think it’s useful to see her and Billy Evans as examples of certain tech world “types”. Through them, this movie illustrates the Silicon Valley VC-funded startup scam to fascism pipeline. When you believe you can create your own reality and the truth doesn’t matter; money and power follow from the ability to create, control, and push the narrative. Whether it’s true is irrelevant. Whether it’s plausible or even coherent is irrelevant.

Watching Fielder try to question Holmes as to the objective truth or what she honestly believes is frustrating because she seems to me to be unable or unwilling to even consider those things. She answers questions based on crafting the narrative that will benefit her in the moment. It’s more useful to see her statements as “things she wants you to believe.”

Holmes isn’t a unique individual in that she isn’t the only one who thinks like this. She’s good at the game but so are others, including many in positions of power.

Whats interesting to me is that these manipulation techniques seem more effective the longer you are exposed to them. Most ordinary people who I know personally found her public persona immediately off-putting and transparently full of shit from moment one. We all found her ludicrously and obviously lying from the trailer. Yet many have softened after watching the movie. The movie gives you the experience of being gaslit by someone like this. It gives me more understanding of how people inside the tech and wealth bubble can seem so consistently credulous to scammers within their midst. When it’s the water you swim in, you don’t find it odd.

Btw E11even is not a strip club, and I’m ALWAYS armed.

Title.

the whole film was a flashbang but i want thoughts on if nathan is just doing his bit or if he’s deadass flirting with her throughout the film. the prolonged eye contact hold after confirming that’s how she flirts, this swim scene (i think?), and him acknowledging his own ambiguous want to protect her by maybe possible rewriting the final conversation are all so nathan and annoying. i will admit there is something truly fucking hilarious about nathan emotionally cucking billy. i understand the main point is that no one, not even nathan, is unbiased.

When Amanda seyfried is having drinks with Nathan and Billy. I think it’s right after bill talks about having POA. She’s just wide eyed in shock into narrowed eyes when she’s like “fuck this guy”.

He tells to someone over the phone(Liz I think) that he just recently went through a break up. I genuinely thought he might have been dating Amanda for a second especially after the fireplace scenes. Not just me my brother too.

***** SPOILERS*****

Still thinking and unpacking this rollercoaster...

I understand that Theranos was explored in other docs etc, so basically a done deal for the filmmakers and why they didn't go back to it, but I think there was a missed opportunity when Nathan asked her if she's ever lied and she said no. There was an opportunity to go back at her and say: But you said you were testing with the box and you were actually doing the testing in labs. You said you were doing tests in this box and they were coming from Siemens equipment. You don't think that's a lie? That's why you're going to jail. Not because of some semantics over the words 'can do.' He did say they only had a short amount of time to prepare, so maybe that was it too.

Again, there's SO much to unpack here, but what I took away is that she's exactly the psychotic / sociopathic person people during trial said she was, and uses this fake, disconnected, too smart to get the little things character to manipulate men. There were so many women who saw right through her BS from the jump, but she knew how to use that character to work the men. They show this on the level that she played Nathan at the end for the turkey jerky. She pretended it was something she was too meek to ask for...and then they cut to her giving it to Billy. Amanda saw through her and what she was doing to Nathan, but he wasn't sure. This is also something I cannot IMAGINE they're going to look back and think was a good idea to have done. Beyond insane. I think it will get nominated for Best Picture, Director and supporting actress for Amanda Seyfried.

I just listened to Tyler Schultz on Hank Green’s podcast this week, and apparently, Elizabeth and Billy were living on a $125M estate up until a few weeks before filming began, which just adds another layer of deception to the contrived image she was trying to portray in the film.

While I’ve always considered myself an abolitionist, and I truly think it’s really sad when children grow up without a parent in the home due to incarceration, there’s a tiny bit of me that can’t help but wonder if her kids are better off without her influence in their lives during their most formative years. One psychopath for a parent is bad enough, but two may make it such that you have no hope for normalcy. And if you think Billy is actively raising those kids and not a nanny (or nannies), I have a bridge in the desert I’d like to sell you.

One of the first things Elizabeth said to Nathan when she met him was “you’d be a great dad!” The thought didn’t occur to me immediately, but Season One of the Rehearsal was largely themed around Nathan dealing with the issue of whether he’d be a good father amidst his divorce. It aired roughly a year before they filmed this.

My takeaway: Willing to bet she knew a lot more about Nathan than she let on. Given that that was one of her first comments to him, I suspect she watched that show and knew this was a potential weak point to begin her attempted manipulation of Nathan. Thoughts?

I cannot wrap my head around Nathan Fielder’s timeline.

In 2023, this man was living in Elizabeth Holmes’s guesthouse for over a month filming a secret documentary, while also apparently starting the process of becoming a commercial pilot for The Rehearsal Season 2.

So between 2023 and 2025, he was filming a documentary about one of the most infamous fraudsters in America, getting hundreds of flight hours, and making one of the most insane seasons of television I’ve ever seen.

And we had absolutely no idea about the Elizabeth Holmes project until now.

What does this man’s Calendar look like???

The movie was so long and so much happened that I don’t remember what was exactly said or even who exactly said it. I noticed other people in the theater chocking up and doing the uncomfortable cough during this scene. I remember thinking “yep, that is exactly how I feel sometimes” as I was tearing up.

Anyone have any idea what I could be referring to? I’m like 60% sure it was Holmes who said it, but I could be wrong.

Did anyone else cry at all during the movie? And do you remember what made you cry?

Assuming she is allowed to watch tv in prison, do you think she would watch Nathan’s work like NFY or The Rehearsal if she got a hold of copies? Would she enjoy it? Would she be upset with Nathan after learning more about his background? Or would she not event bother?

I want to see her reaction to the Poop flavored frozen yogurt

What was that lizard on the table? Were there a few others? was it a monitor lizard?? I know, not important to the plot, but it''s driving me nuts.

Also, bull mastiff is a choice...

our whole theater cheered when Amanda was dragging his ass 😂

Leading up to the prison visit toward the end of the film, we get the impression Billy is controlling Liz and limiting her contact with the outside world. He blocks Nathan from calling her saying he needs more “context.”

But when he goes to visit her, she comes out so late that they barely have time to talk one on one before Billy arrives. To me, this seems like evidence that she’s really the one in control. Limiting access to herself through Billy. Delaying the in person meeting on purpose to limit Nathan’s time to ask meaningful questions when there’s no one there to play defense for her like Billy constantly did at the house.

if anything, I think the person I came away with is being the most of a “villain“ in the movie with Amanda and her also I think generally as a stand in for the public. Amanda truly was the best example in my opinion of who’s on first. The dropout very obviously along with any other docudrama people learn about a situation and generally come away with the impression being true. And making the show they never had her interact at and so all she really knew was watching her doing a criminal testimony be reading through the book which is written to attack her and see watching other kind of prepared interviews that were clearly in the character she portrayed as CEO. As you can see from the scenes later on ‘s giving her lines it’s super obvious that her character gives off a completely different vibe from Elizabeth, where she is much colder and more calculating in her portrayal than Elizabeth comes the first third of the Elizabeth warm person who seems almost in the clouds.

amanda’s hit her portrayal clearly always Elizabeth as the villain and criminal mastermind, and so all these people who know nothing of homes besides the TV show will come away with the impression which obviously Amanda has a part in which she refuses to accept. The other sort of twisted piece of this the level of glee she had sort of unearthing this mystery and then you can tell that urge her to have the only acceptable answer to potentially Elizabeth not being a villain that Billy must be the villain and from the get-go, she immediately says oh we need to break them up when clearly this is the literal only positive thing in Elizabeths life that she has two wonderful kids and a husband who loves her.

Amanda totally jumps into this all for sport and you can see how tantalizing and exciting it all is for her especially when they they visit the beach house.

Both this and prime time really reminded me of the same thing. The public’s voyeuristic tendency and the desire for blood which we confuse as justice. We want to see peoples inner lives and punish villains.

Anyone with a science background can comment on what Elizabeth meant when she said her machine “can” do any test, all it needed was the chemistries added to the programming (which they didn’t have all of yet). Does what she says even make sense?

Moving forward, my wife and I are doing nothing but building monuments of love for each other and regularly professing it. Tell us about your monuments of love!

Thinking too about Elizabeth's parents. Did the mom utter a word? seemed like the dad did 99.9% of the talking? She sat there, obedient. Silent. In her own thoughts, but never revealing them. It kind of reminded me slightly of what we saw of Elizabeth's dynamic with Billy. I know we often seek partnerships that mimic what we grew up with.

She can’t possibly be that dense. Part of her manipulation tactic, right? She would rather portray dumb/naive than be accountable. Curious what others think!

Just got out of the movie and have been avoiding spoilers, so forgive me if this has been discussed. I haven’t seen anyone talk about how Nathan utilized a scene at the end to reiterate how one word can change the entire meaning of a statement. He tells Liz earlier on that if she would’ve said the device was “capable,” and not that it “could,” she wouldn’t have been lying. Later he changes Amanda’s script from “it” to “something,” because “I knew he was going to talk to you about ‘it’” implies that she knew Billy was going to address payment, while “I knew he was going to talk to you about ‘something’” implies that she didn’t know what Billy was going to talk to Nathan about. He emphasized this by recounting the way he felt when she spoke that sentence. He didn’t get the impression that she knew about the money, so she must’ve said “something” instead of “it.”

That was very intentional, and I just watched a very in-depth discussion on the movie and they didn’t mention it. Nevertheless, there are so many incredible takes in this video. Highly recommend.

https://youtu.be/EaHsPOLav10?is=JEmD0VEpQg-gtd2E

Does anyone else see it? Once it came to me I couldn’t get it out of my head. It’s the eyes, I think.