Story of ‘The Dropout’ played out in court and on set. ‘I felt alive and terrified’

Halfway through shooting “The Dropout,” showrunner Liz Meriwether received 1,000-plus pages of court documents from the fraud trial of Elizabeth Holmes that would impact her story of the founder of blood-testing startup Theranos.

(Birdie Thompson / Disney)

I stared at the email. It had just been sent to me by the journalist and podcast producer Taylor Dunn with the subject, “More text messages sunny + eliz.” Taylor had produced the podcast “The Dropout” for ABC News along with Rebecca Jarvis and Victoria Thompson, and she had been covering the trial of Elizabeth Holmes and sending me updates periodically when new evidence was introduced.

It was Sept. 7, and we had been shooting the limited series adaptation of the podcast for more than two months. We had a month left to go. I had a 5-month-old baby in the room next to my office, and a live feed from the rolling cameras on my computer. I had spent two years on this series — researching, interviewing, writing, rewriting, rethinking, prepping, freaking out, rewriting again, freaking out again. I had been on conference calls with lawyers for hours discussing every detail, every word, every action line in every script. The writers had to justify our choices based on the facts we had, so we had scoured the source material, trying to piece together the mystery of what had happened between Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani behind closed doors at Theranos.

And here I was about to open an attachment with the actual text messages that Elizabeth and Sunny had written to each other. It was thrilling and infuriating. I was desperate for these text messages a year ago or even six months ago — not now, not when we had already shot five episodes of the series, not when Naveen Andrews and Amanda Seyfried had already crafted their beautiful, nuanced performances in those roles. What if there was something in this attachment that changed everything about the story? I went numb, braced myself and clicked open the attachment.

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The document was 1,451 pages. The text messages didn’t even start until Page 707. Rows and columns. Dates. Times. There was a disorienting business-like organization to the conversations. The drama and emotion and panic and love were reduced to data on a spreadsheet. These people who had become characters in my mind and flesh and blood on camera were living out the worst moments of their lives through subpoenaed text messages.

It felt uncomfortable to read, but I had to look.

We would start shooting the next day’s batch of scenes in a few hours, and I had to know if everything we were going to shoot was still accurate. In a permanent squint, I made my way through 300 pages. I opened a sticky note on my desktop for quotations and page numbers. I wrote down anything interesting or sad or funny or human. I wrote down the messages where emotions broke through or where I could see a glimpse of life. I wanted to try to understand the day-to-day reality of Sunny and Elizabeth’s relationship — a relationship that they had kept secret for 12 years.

In all the research I’d done, there was almost nothing known about who they were in private. The scenes I’d written between Sunny and Elizabeth had been the hardest to write, and I found myself changing them wildly between drafts, which is never a good sign. Months ago, Naveen, Amanda, director Michael Showalter, producer Katherine Pope and I had all come together, masked, to read the scenes out loud. It was the first time I’d heard Amanda’s heartfelt, nuanced version of Elizabeth Holmes’ distinct voice. Even through a mask, it felt electric. I watched as these two actors made sense of a relationship that had been such a struggle to write. The last thing they needed were a million script changes based on these new text messages.

I didn’t need to worry. As I worked my way through the spreadsheet, I got a text from Amanda: “Have you seen these new text messages?” Taylor had sent the texts to Amanda too, and now she was reading through them in the middle of the night just like me. Once again, I was in awe of the fearless, open way Amanda approached her work. She was already absorbing the new information and finding a place for it in her body and mind and heart.

And it was Amanda’s voice I heard speaking through the messages. There was an unexpected, almost childish exuberance in Elizabeth’s messages to Sunny. She called him “Tiger.” They spoke about the intensity of their love for each other, as if it were written in the stars. One message from Sunny to Elizabeth stuck out. During the company’s downfall, Sunny had texted Elizabeth: “This was always your dream, not mine.” I knew I had to incorporate that line into the scene where Elizabeth fired Sunny from the company, but I realized, with dread, that we were shooting it the next day.

After rehearsal, I sat on the floor of the massive, beautiful Theranos office set and dictated the new lines to Naveen as he scribbled them into his sides. It had taken less than 24 hours for the words on the spreadsheet to become dialogue spoken in front of the camera. The story was being written simultaneously in court and on our sets. It was insane. I felt alive and terrified. That night, watching Amanda and Naveen square off through the glass office walls, I could hear a voice in my head. I’m a writer, so I’m used to hearing voices, but this was my voice. And it was loud and insistent. “Remember this moment.”