If you think Amanda Seyfried is nothing but a Mean Girl, think again. In the new Hulu series The Dropout, based on the explosive podcast of the same name, Seyfried stars as Elizabeth Holmes, the medical technology wunderkind who managed to con some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley into investing in her half-baked medical device company, Theranos. In this week’s episode of Next Question, Katie talks to Seyfried about how she came to both embody and identify with the convicted former Theranos founder.

If you’ve seen any interviews with Holmes, you know she’s got a very distinct way of speaking, dressing, and interacting. Seyfried’s transformation into Holmes is spectacular, down to the strange inflection in her forcibly deep voice and the strained smile she wears for the cameras.

So, how exactly did Seyfried come to embody Holmes so fully? “I started by studying the deposition tapes,” she tells Katie. “When you have that many hours of footage of somebody just sitting there with one camera, and you’re just staring at them, you don’t miss a thing.”

When Katie asks Seyfried to “do the voice,” she willingly obliges, telling Katie, “The accent is just really about the way her mouth moves…I had an easier time doing it after I had Covid because I was coughing so much that my register got much deeper.”

Although she’s got the voice and mannerisms down pat, Seyfried has never actually met Holmes, which she admits she’s glad about: “I don’t think I would’ve been able to play her. I would have felt bad.” Katie on the other hand had a very personal experience with Holmes back at the height of Theranos’ fame. Katie says, “I went to her office and we talked, and she got tears in her eyes when she told me how she wanted to help people with cancer. I think she knew that my husband had died of cancer, and I’ve done so much cancer advocacy work. She seemed to care so deeply.”

Seyfried isn’t sure if Katie’s experience with Holmes was genuine or just another example of Holmes’ master manipulation. She says, “That story makes me really uncomfortable…I want to believe the good. I think she really believed the tech was working. But I’m skeptical.”

To hear more of Katie’s interview with Amanda Seyfried, make sure to listen to this week’s episode of Next Question.