‘The Wilds’: How Elizabeth Holmes Inspired Rachel Griffiths’s Portrayal of Gretchen Klein
The Wilds has an interesting villain with Gretchen Klein (Rachel Griffiths), who’ll do anything to keep her unethical experiment going. Griffiths revealed her character is similar to Elizabeth Holmes and how a documentary helped inspire her to play the Amazon Prime Video character.
[Spoiler alert: Spoilers ahead for The Wilds Season 2 finale!]
Gretchen Klein’s experiment on ‘The Wilds’ takes a turn in season 2
The first season follows teenage girls after a plane crash. It’s slowly revealed that Gretchen Klein orchestrated the whole crash. She’s running an experiment to prove girls can make a better society than boys if left to their own devices. Gretchen proves this by watching one group of girls and another group of boys survive after a plane crash in the wilderness.
Season 2 finally shows the group of boys. But it didn’t take long for the experiment to take a turn. The boys exiled Seth Novak (Alex Fitzalan), who was also her operative. She had no clue why because Seth cut the microphones and lied.
There was a point where Gretchen seemed like she was giving up hope because she couldn’t find the source of the conflict in the group through interrogation. But she didn’t give up after all. Josh Herbert (Nicholas Coombe) told her Seth assaulted him. Gretchen seemed thrilled and said her theory on bad male behavior was correct.
Rachel Griffiths reveals how Elizabeth Holmes and Gretchen Klein are alike
Actors often pull from real people to help tell their stories. Griffiths said watching The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley helped her prepare for her role, according to Insider.
“That documentary…was probably singularly the thing that was my hook,” the actor claimed. The documentary followed the rise and fall of Holmes creating a $9 billion company called Theranos. However, she hid that the technology she claimed she created didn’t actually work. The CEO was convicted of three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. She hasn’t been sentenced yet. The Wilds actor explained that her character has the same mentality to keep going on a harmful project.
“Everyone is like, ‘The box isn’t working.’ She’s like, ‘It’s working, it’s working perfectly,’” Griffiths recalled. “You know, ‘It’s working, it’s really working!’ That kind of craziness.”
Griffiths calls Gretchen a ‘sociopath’
She then called Gretchen a “sociopath” who justifies harming other people for a greater cause. “So for that, I probably drew more from looking at public figures around the world at the moment, who promote ideologies and don’t look in the mirror and think they’re evil but have a cognitive dissonance about the impact of what their policies or ideas might be doing,” Griffiths explained.
Season 2 ended with Gretchen going on the run. But she has Seth stay behind to watch the groups. Chances are it’ll take more than an investigation by the FBI to stop her.
