“Isn’t it weird that I, like, did a TV show about kind of a business scam, and you got in trouble for like … a business scam?” comedian and filmmaker Nathan Fielder asks Elizabeth Holmes. One month before the former Theranos chief began serving her 11‑year federal fraud sentence in 2023, Holmes and her husband reached out to A24 in a final attempt to clear her name publicly, proposing that a film crew follow her during her last days of freedom. Together with director Lance Oppenheim, Fielder—known for his cringe‑comedy that blurs fact and fiction—took on the daunting task of uncovering who the infamous Stanford dropout truly is. “I never actually made that connection,” Holmes says. “I think it’s a pretty different situation.”
Fielder is uniquely equipped to probe Holmes’s mindset. His satirical docu‑reality series “Nathan for You” made him a cult figure as he played an exaggerated, deadpan version of himself, offering absurd solutions to struggling small businesses. In a viral early episode he convinced a coffee shop to rename itself “Dumb Starbucks” as a marketing stunt, consulting a lawyer to stay within parody law. “If you just said that, you know, Theranos was a comedy bit, maybe you could get off scot‑free,” Fielder tells Holmes. “It was real.” “I was just kind of making a little joke. Maybe it was in bad taste,” she replies.
Holmes’s guilt is no longer in question, but whether she truly believes she did nothing wrong remains unclear. During her trial she heard testimony from investors who lost hundreds of millions, whistleblowers who warned that Theranos’s blood‑testing devices failed, and patients who acted on inaccurate results, yet she never wavered. Across Fielder’s layered comedy, even his most devoted fans struggle to tell when he is acting, when he is being himself, or whether he even knows where the line ends. In that respect, he mirrors Holmes: after more than a decade in the spotlight, observers are still fascinated by their ambiguous personas. “The world believes a reality about me that isn’t true,” she tells Fielder. “I know I didn’t commit any crime.”
Early in filming, The New York Times published a profile of Holmes that was widely criticized for allowing her to appear as an innocent mother denied the chance to watch her children grow. Holmes and her husband, hotel heir Billy Evans, were furious about the piece. In an interview Holmes told the reporter she was not offended by Amanda Seyfried’s portrayal of her in Hulu’s miniseries “The Dropout,” saying, “they’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.” She and Evans later claimed the quote had been taken out of context and that they possessed evidence showing she actually said, “They’re playing a character they created,” which would remove any implication that she admitted to inventing a false persona as Theranos CEO. Fielder repeatedly asks Evans for this evidence so he can prove Holmes was misquoted, but Evans never provides it.
When Holmes reports to prison, Fielder is left to make sense of a month’s footage. He brings in the actress who played Holmes in “The Dropout” to help dissect her puzzling behavior. He shows Seyfried a stark clip from his time with Holmes, in which they watch “The Dropout” together. During a tense scene involving Holmes’s manipulative ex‑boyfriend and former Theranos partner Sunny Balwani, who is also incarcerated, Holmes can no longer watch the fictional version of herself, turns away and cries. In other words, Seyfried watches Holmes react to Seyfried’s portrayal of Holmes, who was likely also playing a character.
Seyfried is not the only one crafting a rough approximation of the real Elizabeth. Evans has built a lifelike AI avatar of his wife, displayed on a tall screen he rolls to the dinner table so it appears she is present with him and their children. The rest of the film becomes a collage of colliding personas. Although it is presented as a nonfiction documentary, everyone involved is, to some degree, performing for the camera. Seyfried’s desire to understand Holmes’s story seems sincere, but the audience cannot ignore that she landed a major role in one of the year’s most talked‑about productions. Meanwhile, Evans behaves in such an alarmingly unsympathetic way that he may be deliberately playing the villain to generate sympathy for his embattled wife. He knows Fielder and Oppenheim are not convinced of Holmes’s innocence, and the documentary is unlikely to persuade anyone that she is being wrongly held. Yet his appalling conduct may lead some viewers to feel pity for Holmes, seeing her as a victim and reinforcing another persona she adopted at trial: a harmless, docile woman manipulated by her ex‑partner into unintentionally spreading harmful lies.
After Holmes is incarcerated, Fielder is barred from bringing recording devices when he visits her, so he resorts to writing a script of their conversations.