theranos

Audiences who saw Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s hit documentary “You Can See Everything” may have left the theater with a few questions about Elizabeth Holmes and her longtime partner Billy Evans. While the former Theranos CEO is serving time in a Texas federal prison, Evans is active on X and fielding burning questions inspired by the documentary.

If you’ve haven’t yet seen the film, spoilers ahead.

Evans, 34, comes from a wealthy family who owns a luxury resort in San Diego. He and Holmes have two children, a 5-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter, and while Holmes serves an 11-year prison sentence, Evans is raising their kids, pursuing a new biotech venture and running the couple’s X accounts.

In “You Can See Everything,” Evans bares it all for the cameras, revealing everything from his nude body in the shower to his intense personality, among other questionable traits that have been widely discussed since the film hit theaters last month.

On Monday afternoon, he participated in an “AMA” (Ask Me Anything), and fans of the film flooded the comments.

Holmes’ parents, Christian Rasmus Holmes IV (a former vice president at Enron’s Clean Energy Solutions Group) and Noel Anne Holmes (née Daoust), both appear in the film, but as Fielder attempts to interview Holmes’ father, Evans becomes increasingly agitated.

On X, @kalmiavtuber asks, “My biggest question is, Billy, why did you stop Nathan from speaking to Liz’s father? Both Nathan and the audience saw it as integral to the documentary to truly ‘see everything.’ It felt like a missed opportunity that could have continued to give Liz more light.”

Evans replied, “She was going to prison. We had 3 days [together] at the time. I wanted to spend that time together. He interviewed her parents after she went in. They chose not to include that in the film. I didn’t control the edit. If there was something the directors wanted from them they had multiple opportunities to get it.”

One question popped up again and again, in various iterations: “Why did you keep sniffing throughout the documentary?”

And according to Evans, it wasn’t drug-induced sinus issues but, rather, germ- and Texas-induced. He said being a single dad to two toddlers makes him sick “approx 75% of days.” And, “Allergies in Austin TX are no joke. I take Claritin daily. Much less sniffling.”

And as for the blood testing device that Holmes spread out onto the kitchen table — the one that Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz said was not the same device that sent Holmes to prison but, rather, a future version of the Theranos product that was never used and never completed — @insistent_dw asked, “If the Theranos machine really worked as Liz said it did, why did it have to be dug out of storage containers in multiple pieces? I’d expect something like that to be locked in a safe and protected if it’s the prized machine behind a once billion dollar company.”

Evans replied, “Fair question. Theranos had been shut down for years, so naturally the hardware was in storage. We deliberately showed a disassembled device to show its internal components, not because that was all that remained. To my knowledge, 16 complete, functioning devices still exist. And Liz wasn’t reading a script. She was reading directly from the trial transcript. The litigation was still ongoing when we filmed.”

Farther down into the thread, one X user asks, “Have you ever told a lie?” To which Evans replies, “Yes.”

And @alexandraandnyc asked Evans to dispel one misconception from the film: “That I somehow control Liz,” Evans replied. “Anyone who actually knows her would find that idea hilarious.”

“She’s fiercely independent, strongwilled, and my best friend. We are partners in every sense. We challenge each other, disagree, and face the world together. Her closest friends are also some of my closest friends. If I ever mistreated her, they’d have my head.”

While it may have surprised audiences, “You Can See Everything,” landed an R-rating for its graphic nudity. One scene in particular features a full-frontal of Evans, and the dad of two has since said that he wasn’t thrilled with the shower scene making it into the film. When X users pressed him on allowing the cameras into the room, he pointed to a People article that featured anonymous sources saying Evans felt exploited and thought the scene would be kept PG.

“Trust the sources,” he said, alongside a link to the story.

Oppenheim, however, told Vulture last month that Evans seemed to initiate the scene: “It seems like he really had something he wanted to show to us and to the world.”

A former research engineer who worked closely with Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos says “You Can See Everything” doesn’t show, well, everything.

You may remember Tyler Shultz from HBO’s “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” or even the fictionalized series “The Dropout” starring Amanda Seyfried as the disgraced Theranos CEO. He was one of the whistleblowers who raised the alarm when Holmes’ blood-testing technology was not the revolutionary medical device she claimed it to be. Shultz met Holmes through his grandfather, former Secretary of State George Shultz, who sat on the Theranos board of directors and scored Shultz an internship at the medical diagnostic startup, which quickly evolved into a full-time position as a research engineer. During his eight months on the job, he realized something was terribly wrong.

“You Can See Everything” directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim may have fallen into Holmes’ carefully curated trap, Shultz warns in a new essay.

“I’ve had the displeasure of watching disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes at work not just over a three-hour film, but over the entirety of my adult life. I was an employee turned whistleblower at Theranos, my grandfather sat on her board, she came to my family holidays and birthday parties. I met her when I was 20, she went to prison when I was 32,” he wrote in a Stat News op-ed published Monday.

“I wish I could have told director Nathan Fielder what I told [New York Times reporter] John Carreyrou when he started investigating her: Do not underestimate Elizabeth Holmes.”

Los Angeles Times columnist Glenn Whipp wrote that the film leaves viewers with many questions: “about Holmes, about the slippery nature of truth and about the objectivity of documentary filmmaking itself.” The film, labeled a documentary, grossed $15 million this weekend, making it the second-highest-grossing opening for the genre.

But Shultz says that while “You Can See Everything” is an entertaining piece of art, it’s certainly not a documentary, and “it’s dangerous to pretend that it is.”

Shultz calls out what he says are misleading components of the film, including the blood-testing device that Holmes shows Fielder.

“Back to the Theranos device itself. During that scene, my wife had to squeeze my arm to prevent me from jumping out of my seat in the theater and screaming, ‘THAT IS NOT THE DEVICE,’” Shultz writes. “That was not the device I worked with 12 hours a day, not the device we hid from regulators, not the device that constantly failed quality controls, not the device we used to knowingly give patients inaccurate medical results. The device she showed Fielder on the kitchen table was not the reason she went to prison. Elizabeth showed him a future version of the Theranos product that was never completed and never used in order to lead Fielder down this BS semantic rabbit hole and to trick him into litigating the entirely wrong thing.”

The research engineer-turned-whistleblower also called out the quaint two-bedroom condo in which the film was shot, pointing out that Holmes had just recently lived with partner Billy Evans, whose family owns a luxury resort in San Diego, in an estate listed at $125 million.

He also raises questions about the abuse Holmes suffered at the hands of her ex-boyfriend, convicted fraudster and Theranos COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani. Shultz claims Holmes spotted Balwani’s abusive tendencies and clocked him as the perfect fall guy if things went south.

In the mindbending documentary “You Can See Everything,” comedian Nathan Fielder and professed inventor Elizabeth Holmes sit in her beach house staring at each other like gunslingers. Fielder is the creator of the TV series “The Rehearsal” and “Nathan for You” who constructs discombobulating sham realities that include bogus businesses such as Dumb Starbucks. Holmes is the former billionaire CEO of Theranos who pretended she’d built a revolutionary blood testing machine to squeeze investors for a few dollars more.

Each is an expert in the con. But Fielder is deadpan and cold where Holmes is earnest and warm — and he’s been nominated for Emmys while, in May of 2023 when the film begins, she’s about to serve an 11-year sentence in federal prison. As the camera cuts between close-ups of his narrowed eyes and her big, blue ones, Fielder tries to suss whether he can trust the famous fibber to be honest with him. The showdown is riveting.

“You’re being real right now?” Fielder asks, dubious.

Holmes beams. “I’m always being real,” she swears with a smile.

Her charm hits Fielder in the gut. His face stays neutral yet you can see his own confidence bleed out across the screen.

Co-directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim (“Primetime”), “You Can See Everything” is the closest Fielder has come to making a traditional documentary. A thrillingly cringe-tastic interviewer, he blurts out blunt questions like a bungee jumper leaping off a bridge, including asking Holmes’ romantic and business partner Billy Evans, the heir to a San Diego boutique hotel chain, whether it’s possible a woman convicted of fraud might be with him for his money.

At nearly three hours long, “You Can See Everything” won’t bore you for a minute. The hook is right there in the title, Fielder’s challenge to the audience: Here’s how Holmes held up to his scrutiny — do we think she’s telling the truth? But be alert. Fielder remains a trickster. One shot in particular proves you can see everything while being blind to what you’re actually watching.

In the first half of the movie, Holmes and Evans, the father of her two young children, give the small crew complete access to their lives during her last weeks of freedom, including inviting Fielder to sleep in their guest bedroom. It’s an act of “radical transparency,” Evans says. As evidence, there’s a fully nude shot of Evans in the shower, testifying to the intimacy the subjects claim they’re granting the team and the confidence they have that the documentary will make them look great. (Evans also boasts that he’s “excellent” in the sack.)

Holmes maintains both her innocence and her eerie smile, a rictus of empathy. She constantly nods, subliminally snake-charming the listener into a sense of agreement. That assessment might be fair or it might be her reputation making you over-analyze her tics. Doubling down, she even insists she’s never told a lie in her life — a claim that momentarily leaves Fielder at a loss for words.

Yet at times, Holmes really does appear to be sincere. Once she surrenders herself to the Bryan Federal Prison Camp in Texas (where, in an unmentioned coincidence, Epstein collaborator Ghislane Maxwell is also incarcerated), the tone shifts into film noir as Fielder struggles to reconcile Elizabeth Holmes’ dual identities. Is she the sweet-natured scientist, the only version of her he’s ever met, or a femme fatale who may still be running a scam?

“It’s personal,” Fielder says of his fixation. How frustrating that he of all people — the dark prince of pranks — may be Holmes’ latest patsy. Composer Ari Balouzian borrows bits of Bernard Herrmann’s violin score from “Vertigo” while cinematographer David Bolen makes the audience hold its breath by framing an image of Fielder and Holmes like they might kiss.

When the movie’s style gets weird, that’s when Fielder is most in his wheelhouse. Stop reading now if you want to preserve the surprise. Micro-analyzing his encounters with Holmes, he reenacts them with an actor, Amanda Seyfried, whose emotional intensity blows into the film like a gust of fresh air. Seyfried, of course, won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for playing Holmes in the 2022 miniseries “The Dropout.” The twists to come, however, feel as much like last year’s naughty hit “The Housemaid,” the domestic thriller in which Seyfried played a shady wife with a marriage made of lies.

Evans initially seems to think they’re participating in a project closer to Netflix’s glossy portrait of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. The couple doesn’t know much about humor, pop culture or Fielder himself. Fumbling to figure out what makes him tick, Evans attempts to neg the provocateur as someone who lacks the passion to think differently. (Evans may also be the person who used Holmes’ social media account to write a flattering post calling JD Vance “Lisan al-Gaib,” revealing he’s entirely missed the point of “Dune.”)

But thinking differently is Fielder’s awkward superpower. Sooner or later, all of his projects circle around to his concern that he’s simply wired to be unpleasant. His interactions with Holmes are pure cringe comedy, like when she starts to cry perhaps a bit on cue and he stiffly sputters, “Do you want, like, a tissue?” For the record, he brings her one.

As a viewer, the biggest strike against Holmes is this documentary’s very existence. Whether or not you think she’s guilty of fraud, she is about to be separated from her infant and toddler until they’re in grade school. Who on Earth would genuinely want Fielder, the human equivalent of a skunk, to crash their last moments with their loved ones as he does his darnedest to stink up the place?

Fielder is most comfortable as the film’s villain, shooting himself lurking in the couple’s house like “Halloween’s” Michael Myers. At times, his presence does feel monstrous. In one scene, he needles Evans about whether he thinks his soulmate has ever lied to him while Holmes is on the phone in the next room, tearing up as she asks how often she’ll be able to bathe in prison.

The film doesn’t drill into the technical details of Theranos beyond one dizzying scene where Fielder tries to pin Holmes down on exactly what she meant when she said her machine can run hundreds of different tests. She means it just as I would if I bragged I can benchpress a beer keg — that is, once I strength-train beyond my piddly 5 lb dumbbells.

Instead, it tilts into becoming a caper flick as Seyfried’s commitment to understanding her character’s motivation inspires the actor to invite herself along. The drama they uncover is psychological, as befits an era where Silicon Valley CEOs are closer to cult leaders than engineers, making their cash from being televangelists for their IPOs. And both are attuned to the moments when Evans lets his aggravation slip. One scene is a doozy.

Ultimately, suspicion reigns. “You Can See Everything” is an absorbing study of public presentation and private doubts, a documentary that asks more questions than it answers. I hope Fielder will smile and nod approvingly at me if I say I left the film distrusting him, too, especially Seyfried’s re-staging of a long monologue Holmes delivered in prison where recording devices aren’t allowed. Can we believe that Holmes really did say, “I’m tired of having other people speak for me,” or was that laugh line written by the master manipulator himself? I’m now as paranoid as he is — and what a pleasure.