The Dropout is a true-crime story that happened right in front of our eyes, as a young woman named Elizabeth Holmes (played in the Hulu series by Amanda Seyfried) became a Silicon Valley darling with her concept for a blood-testing device that could revolutionize the health care industry — if it worked, that is.
One of the first people to decry Holmes as a fraud was Richard Fuisz (William H. Macy), a family friend of the Holmes who took offense at his neighbor’s daughter getting involved in medical technology — his field of expertise — without consulting him. His investigation into Holmes’ work ended up being key to the reveal that her company was raising a billion dollars of funding for fraudulent devices, even while his obsession with exposing Holmes as a fraud coincided with the end of his marriage.
For this press day, conducted via Zoom (that’s relevant to later), Macy was taking a break from filming the upcoming film Maybe I Do in Montclair, New Jersey. For that role, he has a full head of hair and a tidy mustache going, which is a far cry from his look in The Dropout, in which he plays Fuisz with a receding-to-the-point-of-nonexistence hairline and scruffy goatee.
In the interview below, transcribed and edited for clarity, Macy explains why he thought it was important to commit to that degree of transformation (which he says was “brand new territory” for him, requiring two hours in the makeup chair every day). We also, in the time allotted, spoke in a more abstract sense about the kind of world that allowed Elizabeth Holmes to get away with what she did.
As he puts it, “It’s all showbiz.”
