A version of this story about Michael Showalter and “The Dropout” first appeared in the Down to the Wire: Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
Back when Michael Showalter was a cast member of MTV’s “The State,” or the co-writer and star of “Wet Hot American Summer,” or the creator of the series “Search Party,” you wouldn’t necessarily have picked him as a candidate to be the first director to guide one actress to an Oscar win and another to an Emmy win in the same year. But Showalter accomplished the first part of that feat in March when Jessica Chastain won the Best Actress Oscar for Showalter’s “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” — and now he’s in pretty good shape to seal the deal because he directed the first four of the eight episodes of the limited series “The Dropout,” which made Amanda Seyfried an Emmy favorite for her performance as the ambitious but disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
“In both cases, from the very minute that they started to show me the characters they were creating, I said, ‘Keep going, that’s amazing,’” Showalter said of directing Chastain and Seyfried. “I saw those characters continually blossom, and there were moments where we would shape the scenes and figure it out almost like a puzzle. And in both cases, there were so many times when we would be behind the monitor thinking, ‘My God, she’s killing it. This is magic.’”
Those two productions were part of a busy few years for Showalter, in which he also directed the Apple TV+ limited series “The Shrink Next Door,” shot the pilot of “I Love That for You” and did an upcoming feature with Jim Parsons, “Spoiler Alert.”
“The irony,” he said with a laugh, “is that I did all of those during the pandemic and I never got COVID. Then I had to have back surgery, and I got COVID in the hospital.”
Most of Showalter’s recent projects, including “The Dropout” and “Tammy Faye,” are based on true stories. “I’m drawn to knowing a story happened in the real world,” he said. “The fun is trying to recreate it and imagine what it would have been like within those rooms at Theranos. One of the things that’s fascinating about Elizabeth is, how was she able to handle how big things got? If I forget to respond to an email, I’m having a nervous breakdown. But she was spinning 20 plates at once and borrowing from Peter to pay Paul and lying to people and playing people off each other. And I think, how do you do that?”
Some of the most dramatic moments in “The Dropout” are scenes that Showalter shot of Seyfried standing in front of a mirror as Holmes creates a new persona: deeper voice, Steve Jobs-style black turtleneck, confidence as a shield…
“She sort of created a second version of herself, a new Elizabeth,” he said. “The pre-turtleneck Elizabeth was overwhelmed, but the post-turtleneck Elizabeth could handle it.”
As the director of the first four episodes, Showalter said he was also cognizant of developing a visual language for the limited series — particularly in the first few minutes, with its dizzying array of techniques and its non-linear approach. “Right in the beginning, there’s about 10 different camera styles,” he said. “We use slow motion, we use steadicam, we use handheld. There’s a long tracking shot where she’s running. We’re sort of saying that the camera is also telling the story, there’s a narrative approach to it, and an evolution as Elizabeth changes.”
And when he looks back at the two characters, Seyfried’s Holmes and Chastain’s Bakker, Showalter does find some similarities. “They’re certainly both women who have a large public presence and seem enigmatic in a way,” he said. “There’s something about them that feels unknown. They were larger-than-life figures under a lot of scrutiny from the media and the public who seemed to be hiding. In Tammy’s case, hiding behind her makeup and her hair and her wardrobe and her voice and mannerisms. And with Elizabeth Holmes, with the persona that she created. I wanted to try to understand what was behind the masks.”
Read more from the Down to the Wire: Drama issue here.
