‘The Dropout’: Naveen Andrews Shares What It Was Like to Film During Elizabeth Holmes Trial
The Dropout is in the middle of its release schedule, but what’s even more dramatic than the Hulu series is when it was filmed.
Production on the eight-part limited series was still filming while Elizabeth Holmes herself was on trial. In a new interview, The Dropout star Naveen Andrews described what it was like to be filming a biopic about a person’s story that was still unfolding.
The Dropout tracks Holmes’ life from early college years through the rise and fall of Theranos. The controversial CEO duped countless people into thinking her company’s prototype for at-home blood testing was functional. She had a Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg-like rise to public notoriety, and then was found guilty of investor fraud on January 4, 2022.
Amanda Seyfried plays Holmes in The Dropout, and Andrews plays Sunny Balwani —Holmes’ business partner and secret boyfriend. Andrews told Collider what it was like to be making this story about Holmes’ life as the trial was actively taking place.
“It was a little odd, to say the least, in the sense that it was almost like the play within the play,” he said. “We’d be on set shooting a scene, and then you’d have a break and we’d rush over to find out what was going on in the trial. That was a unique position to be in.”
The Dropout isn’t the only Hulu limited series documenting real-life. Hulu’s Pam & Tommy aired its series finale on March 8. And Sebastian Stan, who played Tommy Lee, got to speak with Lee before filming began. Andrews said he wasn’t interested in contacting Balwani beforehand.
“Maybe at some point, but certainly not before filming and not now,” he said. “I feel what we have created are characters.”
In regards to those characters, Andrews said he and Seyfried made a decision about Sunny and Elizabeth’s relationship their first day working together. He said their conclusions about their characters were validated by what was revealed about the couple in the course of the trial.
“We made a decision, very early on, probably on day one, about what kind of relationship it was, in terms of the level of intimacy,” he said. “In terms of how things played out, later on, and what might have been revealed in the trial or text messages that came out, perhaps our decisions were in the right ballpark.”
Elizabeth and Sunny certainly displayed a lack of morality in their decisions. When it came to depicting these people on screen, Andrews said he and Seyfried couldn’t really make judgments about them.
“In order to play these characters, and I think Amanda felt this too, it was important not to have any judgments about these people, in order to render them as human beings,” he said. “You couldn’t have any preconceived notions of what our sense of right and wrong is, or it wouldn’t have been possible to do it. That’s not for me to say, in a strange way.”
The Dropout, New Episodes Thursdays, Hulu
