Amanda Seyfried took home the Emmy for best actress in a limited series or TV movie for The Dropout during Monday night’s 2022 Emmys.
The actress was nominated alongside Toni Collette (The Staircase), Julia Garner (Inventing Anna), Lily James (Pam & Tommy), Sarah Paulson (Impeachment: American Crime Story) and Margaret Qualley (Maid).
“It’s a really nice feeling,” Seyfried said of her win as she took the stage. In her acceptance speech, she went on to thank The Dropout cast and crew, as well as her loved ones.
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“It was really hard, but it was like the best time of my life,” the actress said of working on the series.
The win marked Seyfried’s first Emmy nomination and win. In the Hulu limited series, based on the ABC News podcast of the same name, Seyfried portrays disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
Backstage, Seyfried reflected on taking on the role of Holmes in the Hulu series and separating herself from the role after filming was done. “You have to dilute yourself to a point as an actor. I had to dilute myself more than normal because I’m playing somebody I don’t necessarily agree with, but I had to have as much compassion for her as anybody in order to embody this person,” she explained. “I think I just had been done. I had never played somebody that long. Four and a half months of my life, every single day, I gave it all to this job and I was just done. The trial was happening. I was just like, ‘I gotta throw her away.’ I didn’t do the voice for two months until my doorman was like, ‘Can you do the voice?’ And I was like, ‘Sure, Dave. I’ll do the voice. Only for you.’ “
After giving a shout out to her children during her acceptance speech, Seyfried admitted backstage that that prompted a confused reaction from her daughter after seeing her on TV. “It’s my first. I’ve been honored with things but this is an awards show that’s just so massive and they got to watch it on TV. So my daughter actually cried because she was confused about how I spoke to her through the TV. So I called her. She was supposed to be in bed. She’s going to school tomorrow. I didn’t expect that to be the reaction, but I think in ten years she’ll appreciate it. I don’t know about my son. He’s too young to know about anything, really. But I really wanted to do that for them and my husband was like, ‘You gotta just talk to them when you get up there, if you get up there, you gotta talk to them because those are the people that matter and this is what you’re doing it all for now.’ It’s interesting. I gotta have a conversation with her when I get home.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Seyfried said that as soon as she read the scripts for the pilot and episode two, she felt it “created a really nice balance between the Elizabeth Holmes I felt like I knew, and the Elizabeth Holmes that I wanted to know.”
Despite portraying Holmes, the actress did not have contact with the Theranos founder. Seyfried told THR that “there was so much litigation, the Disney lawyers were on top of us in terms of what we could and could not say. So I couldn’t be in touch with her, and I think it probably wouldn’t have been helpful for either of us.”
The 2022 Emmys aired live on Monday from Los Angeles’ Microsoft Theater on NBC and Peacock. Kenan Thompson hosted.
