[Spoilers galore! But come on, you want them.]
You’ve gone out and watched You Can See Everything, joining the nearly 2 million people this weekend who drank in the Nathan Fielder–Lance Oppenheim investigation into the mad psyche of Elizabeth Holmes. You gasped in the theater, you turned to a friend or new friend unable to believe what you just saw, you found yourself still marveling at the moments in the parking lot and restaurant, you texted your other friends both annoyed and superior they haven’t seen it yet. Go pick up your phone right now, another friend has just written back “yeah, I need to see it” while you shake your head at their deprivatory laziness.
But even after all that discussing, all that plumbing, you still have questions about what “Fieldenheim” have created. We all have questions. Heck, Fielder himself still has questions. “I am still struggling to this day to understand what I went through,” the filmmaker told an New York Film Festival audience last month and said he and Oppenheim disagreed over nearly everything that was happening between Holmes and her husband Billy Evans.
But there are some verifiable facts, no matter how Holmes and Evans have an, er, postmodern take on the truth. Here are six key points you’re likely curious about, unpacked to sate your twitchy curiosity.
A24 Pack of Executives
So how did this thing even happen? How was Holmes convinced to do it? Here’s how it went down…it actually began with A24.
The company met with Holmes after she called them looking for exposure (lest you think she was just minding her own business when Hollywood came along. Hey, at least she has taste). “It was to have people see who she is,” Evans recently said. But the parties couldn’t come to an agreement, and the project seemed dead.
Then some weirdness (kismet? No, weirdness.) Fieldenheim were — wait for it — at the Magic Castle together when Oppenheim was visiting LA from NYC. During an improv bit someone from the audience called out Holmes’ name. “Hey, that reminds me, I heard A24 is mulling a Holmes movie!,” Oppenheim said to Fielder when the show ended. Shortly after, Fielder placed a call to A24 offices in NY, and the pair were on the case. Or, at least, on some weirdness they thought could probably never be a movie.
So who are the two A24 execs who met with filmmakers and Holmes-Evans, as the movie reconstructs? The studio isn’t saying, but one thing that is worth knowing: the person who ran docs for the studio and helped guide the project earlier on is…no longer there. Yes, she was not at the company to see everything. That would be Emily Osborne, laid off last year as A24 shelved its doc division. She’s still an executive producer on the film though; the legacy runs deep.
By the way, like all good wannabe lawyers, you may have watched the whole handwring about whether the Holmes-Evans unit could get paid and thought: isn’t there a law against that — against a convicted criminal profiting from their crime? There is. Or there was — the Son of Sam Law. But California struck it down a number of years back, so had Evans and Holmes opted for payment, it likely would have been fine even for Holmes to get paid directly. The money could have funded more blood-testing machines!
Does the Alleged Rape Incident Explain Everything?
It comes and goes so fast you have to lean in to make sure you heard it. Did Holmes’ father say, unequivocally, that everything changed for his daughter when she was raped? It seems like that kind of trauma could indeed make someone dramatically pull back, hide behind a false persona so thick even they’ve lost track of what’s underneath
So is Holmes a rape victim? Yes, she has alleged she is — and that it changed everything. Back at her trial in 2022 she spoke tearfully about an incident when she was at Stanford in the fall of 2003, at 19.
The alleged incident, she said, sent her on a work-constantly, my-startup-must-succeed-at-all-costs path (she founded Theranos and dropped out of college later that academic year).
What do public records say about the event? The Santa Clara County sheriff’s office had gotten a call late one October night that a student named Elizabeth Holmes was reporting an on-campus sexual assault, at a frat house. Deputies were dispatched, according to a document NPR obtained as part of a California Public Records request. We don’t know where the investigation went from there.
Holmes also alleged that Sunny Balwani — her former boyfriend and Theranos COO who was convicted of fraud and is currently incarcerated too — sexually abused her. Balwani has denied the allegations.
Those details certainly contextualize Holmes’ behavior; whether they excuse it is up to you. But no such context exists for Billy. Which brings us to…
Who the Hell is Billy Evans and Is He an AI Who Came Into Existence with a “Design Me an Evil Trust Fund-Bro Stereotype” Prompt?
No. Maybe. Probably not. We don’t know in great detail what Evans’ source of wealth is in the film — just that he has one, and this makes him uber-credible because he doesn’t need anything from Holmes. (“What does she have to gain from me?” as he says in the film.) Or so he’d like us to believe, like Larry David and his whole unattractive-spouse bit.
Of course rather than making us think “oh, he’s privileged, he wasn’t after Holmes for the money,” what we really think is “oh, he’s so privileged, he thinks he can get instant fame by leveraging his notorious wife and then yelling at people who don’t sign up for the ride.” (Evans’ recent appearance with the low-key folks on the All-In podcast — having quite a film year by the way after their cameo cringily yukking it up upon the death of Twitter in Musk — doesn’t exactly boost his credibility.)
Here’s something to know about Evans: the Evans Hotel Group that his grandparents founded some 70+ years ago (The Lodge Terry Pines, the Bahia Resort Hotel, and the Catamaran Resort are its three properties) has gotten into plenty of hot water with local groups in Southern California. Citizens’ orgs said an expansion of the Bahia, for instance, took away access to the public Mission Bay. Which gives Evans and Holmes frolicking on an endless expanse of beach at their Del Mar rental an added pungency. The family also sued some unions in San Diego because they didn’t like how said unions were trying to stop the expansion. The suit was dismissed.
But hey, Evans is in biotech now. Yes, the new blood-testing company talked about in the 2023 section of the film was indeed founded the next year. It’s called Haemanthus — like Theranos, but with extra Haman — and Evans is the CEO. The company actually is working with a legit technique known as Raman spectroscopy but only seem to have one patent. Blood-testing from the people who brought you and/or defended Theranos, what could go wrong?
Amanda, I’m Going to Take You By Surprise and Make You Realize
You know that scene where we first see Seyfried, when she’s sitting there on the couch watching the Holmes footage at the start of the third act and you almost blink in disbelief? “Wait…who…could it…is it?” Well, that happened in real time — that’s the first meeting she and Fielder actually had. In fact so realtime there were no plans to have Seyfried come in and play Holmes in those reconstructions we later see. Fieldenheim just wanted her to react to what happened and maybe provide some talking-head clarity on the arguments they were having. Little did even they know what it would become — a rehearsal for the eventual Rehearsal.
N.B. That farm Fielder visits Seyfried where the animals are fed (and fart). That’s an animal rescue that the actress and Thomas Sadoski founded and live in in upstate New York with their two kids. It’s a pretty rad place — a 501(c)(3) nonprofit on which they’ve saved and housed elderly or endangered ducks, goats, donkeys, cats, chickens and horses, funding the place themselves. They thus don’t take donations, but Seyfried has done work for at least one animal-rights group that is public facing, the anti-kill shelter Best Friends Society. If you donate money, we imagine you’d actually save a living being, unlike whatever time you’re not saving using a Theranos device.
Anyway, Seyfried and Sadoski announced a split after that footage was shot. Hopefully she got to heal there too.
Eggscellent
Besides some pretty chill movies, A24 excels at spinning off memes. Hereditary memes, Uncut Gems memes, memes contrasting its movies with Costco hot dogs. The company thought — we all thought — they had a good one with that close-up two-shot of Fielder and Holmes on the couch. It had already been repurposed so many times.
But when the final history of our era is written and the one true artifact remains, that artifact will, of course, be a meme of the egg scene. So banal; so revealing. There is no one way to whisk eggs. But Evans thinks there is, and he is about to joystick Holmes into doing it that way.
The SNL sketches are coming; so are the Oscar bits. An omelet station will never be the same again.
Like, why would we deceive you?
Bryan Prison Blues?
Federal Prison Camp Bryan, where Holmes is being held, already comes off as a mysterious place in the film, doesn’t it? (We still have vending-machine questions.) But you don’t know the half of it. The place has incarcerated a true motley crew of inmates — Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell is currently there, former Real Housewife star Jen Shah just got out of there in August, and Jenna Ryan, the Texas realtor and convicted Jan. 6 rioter who’s had some seriously wild things to say as she tried to become a right-wing influencer, was released from there last winter. When’s the doc of that place?
The women’s prison is a very low-security facility (one reason Maxwell’s transfer there as a sex offender provoked outrage) and generally holds people with sentences shorter than five years. The facility, about 100 miles outside Houston, has fewer staff than other federal facilities because the inmates are not generally considered violent risks. Family and anyone else approved by the inmate can visit every Saturday and/or Sunday. The prison sits in a residential neighborhood of craftsman-esque homes and singing mockingbirds, and the grounds have even been reported by neighbors as almost seeming like a park. (You may have gotten that vibe from the last scene.)
Holmes, per her sentence, shouldn’t be out until 2034. But a judge ruled earlier this year that because she didn’t cause “substantial financial hardship” to victims she can get out some four years early, in 2030. Meanwhile a Theranos investor who was defrauded by Holmes says he was alerted by the Justice Department that, likely because of good behavior, Holmes is actually headed for a halfway house in Austin this very summer — giving her and Fieldenheim just enough time to plan a sequel for 2028.
