There’s a scene in the middle of episode seven of Hulu’s The Dropout when Elizabeth Holmes (via a transformative turn from Amanda Seyfried) and Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani (in an equally impressive performance by Naveen Andrews) are talking in hushed tones among a sea of adoring employees. Holmes is the founder of Theranos, a medical start-up that claims it can change the face of blood testing and shake up the entire health-care industry, and Balwani is her COO and secret boyfriend. Holmes says that they need to find the root cause of their recent PR problems “instead of putting out fires with more fire.” Balwani looks at her, bewildered for a second, and asks, “The root cause?”
The root cause, as Balwani seemingly understands at that moment, is that they’ve been lying from the very beginning about the technology they have and the changes they can make in the American health-care system. Holmes created Theranos in 2003, when she dropped out of Stanford University and promised an at-home testing technology that could diagnose a host of medical ailments with just a single drop of blood. As time went on, much of the testing proved to be inaccurate if not downright dysfunctional — and yet Holmes and Balwani pressed on, continuing to believe that the breakthrough they promised was still within reach.
At this point in the eight-episode limited series, when Balwani seems to be on the verge of succumbing to their fraud and failures, Theranos and Holmes are about to be ripped open at the very tenuous seams by the public scrutiny that would eventually lead to the pair being indicted by a federal grand jury. But Holmes has convinced herself that none of this is true, that her lies are the truth. Balwani, her COO since 2009 and the man she had been secretly dating for at least five years and moved in with, seems to know this. But he keeps going anyway.
So, who is worse? The blind prophet who cannot abandon her goal? Or the one who willfully follows, knowing the potential harm they could cause to people? The real-life Holmes has, to date, been tried and convicted on four counts of felony fraud and awaits sentencing of 20 to 80 years, and is expected to appeal. Balwani’s trial, delayed because of the pandemic, has just begun this week, and he faces the same 11 felony charges that Holmes faced.
“It’s not my place [to say],” says Andrews, who in that moment in episode seven shows a thousand emotions in just a few seconds on-screen.
It’s this subtlety that has made Andrews a mainstay in TV and film in both his home country of England and the U.S. over the last 30 years. After his U.S. breakout role as Sayid Jarrah in Lost, one of the most popular shows of all time, which ran from 2004 to 2010, he went on to play Dr. Hasnat Khan, the love interest of Princess Diana (Naomi Watts) in Diana; Jafar in ABC’s Once Upon a Time in Wonderland; Jonas Maliki in Netflix’s Sense8; and Julian Cousins in CBS’ Instinct. Now, he’s taken on the role of the very complicated, easily villainized Balwani in The Dropout, which was adapted by Elizabeth Meriwether from the hugely popular podcast of the same name that broke down just who Holmes was, where she came from, and how she ended up taking Theranos into the upper echelons of Silicon Valley and the consumer health-care market and then facing a grand jury.
“When you’re playing human beings,” continues Andrews, who grew up in London and studied acting at Guildhall School of Music and Drama before landing his first film role in 1991’s London Kills Me, “before you go in, you have to suspend your judgment. You cannot render a character as a human being. It’s just not going to happen. And I think Amanda feels this way too.”
This is a regular through line for actors when talking about taking on a role that portrays an actual person, living or dead. And rightly so. It would just be too difficult to play someone to their full potential if you’re constantly judging their actions and their thoughts. It surely wouldn’t be a very convincing performance. But when it comes to something like The Dropout, in which Andrews and Seyfried were watching the trials in the news as they were filming, that pressure would, more often than not, be more intense than usual.
“Oh, yes,” Andrews says. “There’s a weight of responsibility. And I will say this — both Amanda and I felt this curious sense of being emotionally involved. Like, for instance, [Balwani] is going on trial in March, and I have to confess, I am concerned. I’m going to be following it with a concentration and a certain avidness that I would never have had [otherwise].”
That’s certainly a change of heart considering that when the story of Holmes’ deception broke in The Wall Street Journal, Andrews was aware of the breaking news — but he wasn’t particularly interested. “I’m old. Just old,” he deadpans. “I’m not interested in start-ups and young people’s companies and corporations, et cetera, so I just sort of forgot about it.”
When Meriwether’s script came, though, Andrews fell deep into the story, realizing there was so much more than meets the eye. In fact, he felt there were many aspects to it that were almost Shakespearean. “I thought of Macbeth, with Sunny as Lady Macbeth,” Andrews says, referring to Lady M’s infamous influence that led her husband to commit multiple murders, which allowed her to ascend to the throne as queen.
When it came to the physical parallels between himself and Balwani, Andrews found liberation in their resemblance — Balwani was born in Pakistan and educated in the U.S.; Andrews was born and raised in London to Indian parents — but he also went about changing other parts of himself in order to more fully embody Balwani. Andrews found a new tension in the way he moved; he put on weight. “It changes the way you relate to people,” he says of this miming process. “It does something. Once you manage to make [that] transition in your body with a part like that, you don’t care how you look, and you get a lot of freedom.”
Once filming began, Andrews and the rest of The Dropout cast and crew found themselves with an unexpected boon in bringing even more authenticity to the series’ narrative: The real-life events of Holmes’ and Balwani’s court proceedings were happening in real time.
“It was a unique, odd position to be in,” offers Andrews. “We’d be shooting a scene and then finish and go running over to find out what was happening in the trial. It was almost a play within a play, and strangely, luckily enough, ended up working to our advantage.”
Indeed, Meriwether was given an edge as text messages between Balwani and Holmes were released to the public during production. She incorporated those interactions into the script, and, says Andrews, the texts confirmed decisions that were made much earlier about Balwani and Holmes’ relationship, which he admits were a bit of a gamble given that so much was unknown about their private lives and secret romance.
As the filming continued and Andrews learned more about the inner workings of Balwani, he made sure to revert to natural empathy when it came to understanding this man. Though the two were born in different countries, because of Andrews’ immigrant parents — whom he’s described before as abusive and repressive — he understood the idea of displacement, of questioning one’s identity, and of the ruthlessness that can be created in a psyche.
“He was born in ’65, and I was born in ’69,” says Andrews, referring again to resembling (or not resembling) Balwani. “He was born in the subcontinent, and I was born in London. The way I think intellectually is European; it’s different. But in terms of what’s deep down, [pauses] I always felt there was a great deal of insecurity behind what he presented to the world. Both of these characters, Elizabeth and Sunny, were very presentational. But it seemed [to belie] a deep insecurity, which maybe lent itself to being expressed in a kind of tension in his body. Every time you see him, there’s a rigidity, even when he’s relaxing.”
Though many might argue that Balwani and Holmes’ relationship bordered on being emotionally abusive or, at the very least, highly dysfunctional, Andrews leaned into their love, hard.
“There was a romantic aspect,” he says. “Sunny’s whole existence was based around the fact that he was besotted with her. I think he still is. But that’s just my opinion. It became, for me, a question of how far will you go for love? What are you prepared to do for the person that you love? It feels to me that he went pretty much all the way.”
And yet, while The Dropout shows us that side of Sunny, it also shows the darker side of Balwani’s personality — including abusive behavior like throwing a juice at Holmes’ face and regular, huge temper tantrums. While we the viewer see such abhorrent behavior and cringe, for the actor meant to make us have those responses, it’s what makes the job so exciting.
“A lot of people might not see Sunny as particularly romantic,” Andrews continues, “but for some reason, I do. And if there is an imbalance in a relationship, let’s say, the door is certainly open to toxic behaviors that either party may practice on the other in order to undermine them. And to me, that’s tremendously interesting to play.”
Valentina Valentini is a London-based entertainment, travel, and food writer and also a Senior Contributor for Shondaland. Elsewhere she has written for Vanity Fair, Vulture, Variety, Thrillist, Heated, and The Washington Post. Her personal essays can be read in the Los Angeles Times, Longreads, and her tangents and general complaints can be seen on Twitter at @ByValentinaV.
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