Amanda Seyfried on 'You Can See Everything': 'It Scares Me'

Amanda Seyfried has never been an actress content to stay inside comfortable territory, and her latest project makes that philosophy clearer than ever. Returning to the world of disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes for the A24 experimental documentary You Can See Everything, co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the actress is meeting her own artistic anxieties head-on.

Revisiting Familiar Ground in an Unfamiliar Form

Seyfried first embodied Holmes in Hulu's The Dropout (2022), a performance so precise and unsettling that it earned her both an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe. That kind of acclaim can be a trap — the temptation to revisit a celebrated role carries the risk of coasting on what already worked. But You Can See Everything is not a straightforward continuation. The Fielder/Oppenheim collaboration is, by nature, formally adventurous, placing the actress in territory that sits somewhere between documentary and fiction, a liminal space that directors like Errol Morris and Werner Herzog have long found fertile ground.

According to Deadline, Seyfried told People that she feels both "relieved" and "excited" now that her involvement in the project has been made public — a telling pair of words that suggests the secrecy itself was its own source of pressure.

The Productive Power of Fear

"It's important for me as an actor, an artist, I mean, a mom, of course, but as a person in the world who loves to work, to find things that I haven't done before and to do things that scare me in a specific way," Seyfried explained. That framing — fear as a creative compass rather than a deterrent — speaks to a deliberate career philosophy. The actress has shown consistent willingness to test her own limits, whether navigating moral complexity on screen or making pointed decisions about the kinds of projects she will and won't accept. Fans who followed her candid comments about boundaries in her work will recognize that instinct immediately; she has previously spoken openly about discomfort as a guiding signal, as explored in Amanda Seyfried Turned Down a Role Over Sex Scenes: 'I'm Uncomfortable'.

What makes this particular fear productive, it seems, is its specificity. Seyfried isn't describing a vague stage fright but rather a pointed recognition that the experimental nature of You Can See Everything demands something from her she hasn't been asked to give before.

An Artist Drawn to the Edges of Genre

It's worth placing this choice in the context of her recent trajectory. The post-Dropout period has seen Seyfried gravitating toward projects that resist easy categorization. Amanda Seyfried Commands the Screen in Tim Blake Nelson's Haunting Prison Drama illustrated her appetite for challenging dramatic material that prioritizes atmosphere and psychological weight over conventional narrative comfort. The A24 documentary represents a logical, if formally bolder, extension of that same instinct.

The choice of distributor is also notable. A24 has built its reputation on work that defies genre expectations and rewards audiences willing to engage on the film's own terms — think The Rehearsal, Fielder's earlier HBO project that blurred documentary and performance in ways that generated genuine cultural conversation. Seyfried stepping into that ecosystem signals a readiness to have her craft examined under an unusually unforgiving lens.

What to Expect

While specific details about the structure of You Can See Everything remain carefully guarded, the involvement of Fielder — a filmmaker preoccupied with performance, identity, and the slipperiness of authenticity — alongside Oppenheim suggests the film will interrogate what it means to portray a real person rather than simply re-presenting one. For an actress who has spoken thoughtfully about the weight of embodying Holmes, that meta-layer carries real artistic stakes.

Seyfried's career has demonstrated time and again that she functions best when the material demands full commitment. Her relief at the project finally being public may well be the relief of an artist who has been sitting with a difficult, meaningful piece of work and is ready for the world to meet it.

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