Less than a decade after being widely celebrated as a self-made billionaire, among several other accolades, Elizabeth Holmes arrived at the Bryan, Texas women’s prison camp for the first day of her sentence. The biotech entrepreneur was first convicted of fraud back in January 2022, two months before Hulu released its acclaimed scripted limited series The Dropout, which brought the story of Holmes’ rise and fall to the wider masses. That was helped along by the award-winning performance from lead actress Amanda Seyfried, who shared her thoughts on the Theranos founder entering into more than a decade behind bars.
Following The Dropout, Amanda Seyfried stuck with streaming for her next project, the puzzling psychological thriller The Crowded Room on Apple TV+, co-starring Tom Holland. She appeared on Good Morning America to promote the new series, though the conversation kicked off with Michael Strahan connecting the timing of her appearance to Holmes showing up for her prison stay. The Emmy-winning actress, clearly without a go-to statement on the matter, shared a brief but balanced take on it, saying:
I heard that. Today’s the big [day]. Yeah, weird, you know? I feel for those kids, those two kids that are hanging in the balance here. As a parent, I’m just like…as a mom, I dunno. Life’s not fair. But in a lot of ways, it’s fair for her in particular.
Seyfried spoke of Elizabeth Holmes’ two children shared with partner Billy Evans. She gave birth to the first, son William Holmes Evans, in July 2021 ahead of her criminal trial’s start, and to the second, daughter Invicta, in February 2023, while in the midst of attempting to delay her prison start date. Her second pregnancy was announced just weeks before she was sentenced to 135 months (11 years, 3 months), with some questioning the timing. Her legal attempts to get her prison start date pushed back were successful, with a judge pushing the initial April 27 date to May 30 to allow for Holmes to spend more time with her children while sorting out means of childcare. (Her former business and romantic partner Ramesh Balwani, who was also convicted of fraud, began his own prison sentence in April.)
Young children are indeed the most unfortunately affected in cases such as these, without the ability to build core memories of family life before a parent’s prison stint. For that to be Amanda Seyfried’s first thought speaks to the motherly instinct within her; she currently shares a daughter and a son with husband Thomas Sadoski, her former co-star in the 2015 dramedy The Last Word.
But despite having portrayed Elizabeth Holmes for The Dropout, which required digging into her mindset as much as perfecting her specific voice patterns, Amanda Seyfried pointed out that it was justly fair for the woman to be going to jail for her crimes, regardless of her parental status.
Though The Crowded Room is based on the 1981 nonfiction release The Minds of Billy Milligan, it isn’t a dramatization of real events like The Dropout (which made our list of the best true crime shows from 2022). And that change of pace was just was Seyfriend wanted, as she gave this as her lead-in for taking the new role:
I wanted to do something very, very different from what I did in The Dropout, which was life-changing, and so fun.
While it’s not clear if Elizabeth Holmes will be able to utilize an Apple TV+ subscription behind bars, everyone else can stream The Crowded Room starting on June 9, when its first three episodes will premiere. Meanwhile, a Hulu subscription is the best and only way to stream The Dropout.