Amanda Seyfried was especially brilliant at depicting Elizabeth Holmes' emotional blankness on The Dropout

Slate

"Good performances are often determined by their showiness, regardless of whether all the press bombast actually results in a compelling performance," says Claire Davidson. "That Seyfried is so compelling in delivering such an emotionally reserved performance is one thing, and is an aspect of her role that deserves praise in its own right. However, there is an under-discussed element of her performance that has gone relatively unnoticed because of how rare it is to pull off in a dramatic context: emotional blankness. Seyfried’s ability to convey such a drastic, prolonged sense of arrested development within Holmes requires an intense amount of control and precise timing, in which even a detail so minute as the wrong vocal inflection could diminish the dramatic impact of her words. Emotional blankness is not a technique with which Seyfried is totally unfamiliar—Mean Girls saw her portray the embodiment of vapid ditziness—but that was more for comedic relief than as a serious character study. Here, Seyfried is made to direct her emotional focus into making every line sound deliberately rehearsed in its delivery, which is evident in how she purses her lips and clasps her hands at just the right moments for emphasis. Like Julia Garner in Inventing Anna—yet another recent hit streaming series about a scammer—she’s giving a performance in which she plays someone who’s always performing."