Amanda Seyfried looks to see what makes Elizabeth Holmes tick in ‘The Dropout’

Even though she was convicted of defrauding investors, Holmes had to believe in herself, Seyfried says.

“If you want to believe something badly enough and you work hard to make it true, then at some point you’re just going to have to choose whether or not it’s true,” Seyfried says. “Our brains are miraculous. We can forget things. We can bury things. We can create things. And she was incredible at creating things. She could sell me sand if I ever met her.”

Seyfried, who stars in the limited series, “The Dropout,” says she studied Holmes’ idiosyncrasies to get a handle on her character. “The shape of my mouth isn’t the same as hers, but I can make sounds somewhat or pretty close to what she did. That’s my job as an actor – mimicking. But, in terms of the depth of it, I had to work really hard to get there because I speak at such a higher level than she does naturally.”

More hallmarks – the lips, the turtleneck, the messy hair – are essential if you’re doing a “Saturday Night Live” parody. But to get inside Holmes’ mind, she tried to reveal other aspects of the woman.

“The whole point of making this is that you were letting us into a world that we weren’t privy to before and people want to know why,” Seyfried says during a Zoom conference.