Secrets of ‘The Dropout’ Finale: Amanda Seyfried, Elizabeth Meriwether Tell All About ‘Lizzy’ – and That Terrifying Scream

variety.com:

SPOILER ALERT: This piece contains spoilers for “Lizzy,” the finale of “The Dropout,” which premiered April 7 Hulu.When Elizabeth Meriwether was first planning “The Dropout” — her Hulu adaptation of the popular ABC News podcast of the same name, which chronicled the spectacular rise and precipitous fall of Theranos founder, Elizabeth Holmes — she an idea about where she wanted the story to end: Burning Man. “It seemed like an interesting place for a kind of quote-unquote rebirth, you know?” Meriwether said.She could picture Elizabeth, played by Amanda Seyfried, along with her mysterious new boyfriend Billy Evans, as Burners frolicking in the desert without a care in the world.

After all, in August 2018, images of the couple at the annual late-summer festival had emerged on social media: In a viral photograph, Holmes can be seen in a T-shirt and fur-collared jacket, wearing hot pink sunglasses and a blissed-out grin.

Gone was the Steve Jobs-ian uniform — a black turtleneck and black pants — from her Theranos years. Meriwether paused, and then laughed: “And then COVID happened, and I still hadn’t written it.”“I feel like I put off writing the finale so long, because I was just like, I can’t,” she continued. “It felt like this mountain I had to climb; it was admitting that it was over.

But yeah, then it was just like, ‘OK, Burning Man is not a feasible thing for us to do.’”If you’ve watched “Lizzy,” the finale of “The Dropout,” you know what Meriwether, who wrote the episode from a story by her and Sofya Levitsky-Weitz, did instead — an ending that’s detailed extensively below.This final episode would prove to be a test for Seyfried as well, and she cited something her co-star on “The Dropout,” William H.