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This is not to imply that Holmes does not attempt to seek out some fun throughout the course of the story. She hosts a party for her 30th birthday, and, in a perversely charming scene with Naveen Andrews’ Sunny Balwani, is coaxed into dancing with him to Nick Jonas’ “Jealous.” Yet even these expressions of joy are stilted, demonstrating just how dangerously intertwined Elizabeth’s work and personal lives have become. Her dance with Sunny is marked by how uncomfortable and off-rhythm she seems when allowing herself to relax, and, in what is likely one of the most uncanny scenes in the entire series, her birthday party is marked by the appearance of several of her employees donning masks of her face with holes cut into her eyes, projecting a soulless, terrifying reflection of the hollowness of her public persona.
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In the current era of entertainment, actors who profess to deliver the most challenging performances often speak about how much external work is put into allowing themselves to completely transform into their characters—take Benedict Cumberbatch refusing to bathe for his Oscar-nominated performance in The Power of the Dog, or the many times Christian Bale has transformed his body several sizes in all directions , or anything Jared Leto has done in the past decade . Good performances are often determined by their showiness, regardless of whether all the press bombast actually results in a compelling performance. 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.
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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.
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Emotional blankness as a means of characterization has often gone unremarked even in its most obvious instances, a lineage of which The Dropout is clearly aware—just look at its title, a riff on the 1967 film The Graduate, in which Dustin Hoffman played an equally vacuous post-collegiate man with just as little coherent identity or direction for the future. Though many popular uses of emotional blankness as a acting technique feature a male character used as a stand-in to diagnose some sort of societal ill—think of Ryan Gosling in Drive, or Colin Farrell and Barry Keoghan in The Killing of a Sacred Deer—in recent years, as women have been given the platform to have more of a comprehensive handle on centering their own narratives, such methods of characterization have become more common in explorations of trauma. Miranda July’s Kajillionaire and Amy Seimetz’s She Dies Tomorrow , each released in 2020, feature actresses (Evan Rachel Wood and Kate Lyn Sheil, respectively) embodying these sorts of portrayals with aplomb.
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Seyfried’s role in The Dropout does not allow for a clear reading as a broad articulation of a social problem, nor can it be cleanly understood as a narrative depicting the consequences of trauma. On the surface, her role as an archetypal tech CEO, a decidedly modern phenomenon, suggests the former. However, the fact that Holmes’ story is molded by her experiences navigating a male-dominated field as a woman places her in a fascinating straddling of both, particularly as her repeated attempts to dodge accountability demonstrate the broader reality that people who have been allowed to accrue a large sum of power won’t always get what’s coming to them.