Amanda Seyfried and Naveen Andrews on the 'uniquely disconcerting' nature of making The Dropout

No bad blood here: The Dropout costars Amanda Seyfried and Naveen Andrews reveal the research, creative partnership, and surprising lessons behind bringing to life Elizabeth Holmes — disgraced CEO of once-promising but ill-fated biotech company Theranos — and her former boyfriend and business partner, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, in Hulu's eight-episode limited series (streaming now).

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How familiar were you with these characters in this case and this story beforehand, and how much research did you have to do?

AMANDA SEYFRIED: I'd already listened to the podcast and seen [HBO documentary] The Inventor. And I saw I think it was a 20/20 episode. That was well before I signed on to the show. I was refreshed and then I got the show and decided to do it in mid-March [of last year]. So I came with a big suitcase full of knowledge, or knowledge from specific perspectives, for sure. And then I signed on and got this wordbook that was just a bunch of files in a digital file, and it was just pages and pages and tons of videos and interviews that [showrunner] Liz Meriwether had done with the people involved surrounding Elizabeth Holmes. It was just so much information. I never went to college, so this felt like I was cramming in a really exciting way.

NAVEEN ANDREWS: I wasn't familiar really with it at all. I had a very cursory knowledge of what was in the media at that time. Personally, I don't have a huge interest in startups or business, or I'm ignorant about that sort of thing, anyway. So I was just dimly aware of it. It wasn't until the script came and talking to Liz about The Dropout that I became immersed in it.

And in preparing for these roles, did you learn anything that surprised you?

SEYFRIED: I came in with all this compassion and a desperation for understanding what she might have been feeling in certain situations. And then after a while, I felt, like, She must have been so tired. I'm just tired for her. I'll tell you one thing I did learn about myself is that I learned how important boundaries are more than anything. I'm just such an open book for really anybody who wants to know, [but] I do not owe anybody my truth. What I've seen of her is that she walked the opposite way, where she shared what she wanted to share and she kept private what she wanted to keep private. And that was something that I wanted for myself. And now in playing her and talking about my experience, my process with the show is that I'm learning boundaries that I didn't think I had and that I find are necessary in order to keep a little for myself. And I think it was a big lesson for me, especially as a mom and someone who's got other priorities now. It really made it very, very clear to me what I needed to do for myself and my life.

ANDREWS: Once I started to research his background, the idea of a Hindu being born in the Sindh province in what is now Pakistan, that was interesting to me — in terms of displacement. His sense of identity, or lack of, and what that does to somebody deep inside, that was something that intrigued me. And then of course, the fact that I made decisions very early on, that he was desperately in love with Elizabeth Holmes. It started with her, I think. So there was a romantic aspect to the story as well [that surprised me].

SEYFRIED: Naveen and I started out on the same page from the jump. We were both very fascinated by the relationship and the intentions of Elizabeth and Sunny. It really felt like a team effort to bring the writing to life. That was really freeing. Naveen understood exactly what needed to come across, and his instincts always steered us in a more interesting direction.

Amanda, did you feel that you needed to empathize with Elizabeth in order to play her?

SEYFRIED: Of course! Playing somebody, you have to want to know where they came from and what they might have been thinking. You have to put away your judgments and your feelings and start fresh — be on their team for a little while. In order to play them well, you need to understand them as much as you can.

Elizabeth's deep voice — which some say is fake — is so central to this character. How did you create that?

SEYFRIED: I was never going to pressure myself to get that low, because her voice is a bunch of things all at once. It's not just deep, it's sunken in a way that I found really interesting — and I think I had to picture where it was on my body, which is what I do when I'm singing. I worked pretty hard with my voice coach on it. My biggest fear was I don't want to do anything to my vocal cords that's unhealthy, if I can help it. And she made me realize that wasn't going to happen.

ANDREWS: I remember very early on, we were shooting a scene and there was a break — and Amanda came up to me dressed as Elizabeth in the black suit and lipstick, just walked straight towards me [and used the voice], and it was like, whoa. You hope that those mechanics will approach something real, and when that happens, it is quite thrilling.

Holmes was found guilty on four counts of fraud after you finished shooting, and Balwani's trial starts this March (as of press time). Did everything going on in real life make this project more challenging, or did it give you more leeway?

ANDREWS: At first, I can't deny, it was uniquely disconcerting, because events were happening in real time as we were filming where you thought, Oh, God. Is this going to now affect the tenor of our piece? And then when the [information from Holmes' trial] came out, it basically felt — and I think we both felt this way — like the decisions we made very early on about what kind of relationship they had, how intimate it was, were on the right track. Thank God. Because to a certain extent, you take a gamble and you just hope to Christ that you're making the right decision. So that was oddly reassuring.

SEYFRIED: That made it really exciting and a little scary, because you're like, What if we're on the wrong path? What if we got it all wrong? But we knew we weren't, because Liz is incredibly adept at imagining between the lines. And things would come out [in the trial] and we would be kind of relieved in some ways like, Okay, that really matches up with what we already knew, and then what we've created for the sake of this show. So the dramatization and these facts kind of fuse together really well to make a really compelling story [that shows] some compelling motives and perspectives, things that we don't know much about. And that was amazing.

Liz Meriwether told me she would be up late making changes to the script during filming.

ANDREWS: Oh, yeah. We'd get [new pages] the next day when we were shooting. And I have to say, this was a great experience for lots of reasons, but obviously a lot of my scenes were with Amanda, and she was always open to [the last-minute changes]. Because I'm old, my reaction is more like, Why? It's a bit late in the day... And she encouraged me to be open and go with it, which I did. And I can't thank her enough for that. It's unusual to learn from somebody when you're not expecting it, and she did give me that.

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