Long before You Can See Everything put cameras on the real Elizabeth Holmes, Amanda Seyfried spent a season building a version of her for Hulu's The Dropout, a performance that would go on to win her an Emmy. Central to it was Holmes's unmistakable deep voice, something Seyfried treated less like a vocal trick and more like learning an entirely different way of speaking.
Training a voice that was not naturally hers
Seyfried, whose range runs from Mamma Mia to Les Miserables, worked regularly with a voice coach to find the depth the role demanded, even knowing she would never match Holmes's actual register. 'I knew I was never going to get that low because I sit naturally a little above average on the scale of frequency,' she told ELLE. 'So I was just going to do what's deep for me and hope that the audience is already with me.' She described the voice less as a pitch exercise and more as an accent, something built around how differently Holmes's mouth moved compared to her own.
Practicing until it became automatic
Before filming started, Seyfried sent her director, Michael Showalter, videos of herself rehearsing the voice at her farm in the Catskills, at one point running through it while feeding hay to her horses. She repeated the work until, in her words, it became muscle memory, layering in the depth only once the accent itself felt natural. What actually surprised her castmates was not the voice, since she stayed in it throughout the shoot, but her physical transformation partway through filming, when her character traded frumpy button-downs for the all-black turtleneck look now associated with Holmes.
A voice built to be taken seriously
The show frames Holmes's deep register and uniform of black turtlenecks as calculated choices rather than quirks, a way of being heard and respected as a young, inexperienced CEO surrounded mostly by older men. 'She needed to be taken seriously,' Seyfried said. Holmes had reportedly studied Steve Jobs's rhythm and cadence closely during her adolescence, something Seyfried said was audible in how deliberately she spoke. Seyfried also pointed to her co-star Naveen Andrews, who played Holmes's former partner Ramesh Balwani, describing the two characters' dynamic as fundamentally unbalanced in ways that opened the door to real harm on both sides.
Looking ahead to the show's release at the time, Seyfried said she was bracing for the reaction while staying genuinely excited about the project. 'I'm on pins and needles,' she said. 'Are people going to watch it?'
