Hulu gives first look at Amanda Seyfried as Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout
The series is set to premiere in March 2022 on Hulu
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When Kate McKinnon was announced to play Theranos founder and alleged scammer Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu’s The Dropout, it made perfect sense. If there’s anyone who excels at playing eccentric blondes, it’s the SNL star. But, McKinnon dropped out of The Dropout, so Hulu replaced her with Academy Award nominee Amanda Seyfried.
Though some on social media were doubtful that Seyfried looked enough like Holmes to be a viable replacement, Hulu’s first look at the limited series shows all you need is a blonde, blue-eyed actor in a turtleneck to get a realistic-enough looking Holmes.
Hulu shared four stills from the show, three of which show Seyfried donning the Steve Jobs-inspired outfit Holmes was known to wear while running Theranos. One image shows Holmes sitting on the floor in an all-black ensemble, speaking on the phone looking dejected. Other two pictures give a glimpse of Naveen Andrews as Sunny Balwani, the former president and chief operating officer of Theranos, working alongside Holmes.
The series is set to premiere with three episodes on March 3, and will be the first fictionalized account of Holmes’ story. It was recently announced that Adam McKay’s movie about Holmes, Bad Blood—based on John Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood: Secrets And Lies In A Silicon Valley Startup—was picked up by Apple Studios. McKay chose Jennifer Lawrence as its lead, though no other details of its production have been announced yet.
There’s still so much left to unravel in Holmes’ scandal. She is currently in the midst of a trial, facing eleven charges of defrauding patients by claiming that Theranos had revolutionary blood-testing technology. As reported by Yahoo!, “Closing arguments in the criminal case against Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes will begin Thursday [December 16] as jurors weigh whether she intentionally defrauded patients and investors in the blood-testing startup.”
64 Comments
Props to Seyfried if she can even go through one scene without busting out laughing while doing Holmes’s low voice.
I love the fact that she only dropped it once, while leaving a cold, threatening voicemail for someone. It’s a perfect screenwriting detail, and it actually happened.
According to Bad Blood (the book) a number of employees had offhand stories about her absentmindedly dropping the voice. It’d be amazing if Seyfried could convey that effort.
That’s my concern. Can she pull off the voice changes. I love the people in the podcast who knew her pre Theranos and said the voice was bullshit. Also, Holmes is 5’7″ and Amanda is 5’3″. I know they can put her in heels to get her taller but Holmes had quite a presence.The Bad Blood episode explaining George & Tyler Schultz falling out, and in the end he never apologized to Tyler for what he did. Elizabeth gifted George with millions of dollars worth of Theranos stock, and flirted with him, playing on his and other old men’s need to be attractive to a younger woman.
Damn, Holmes cashing in on not one, but *two* anti-hero flicks. Score
I like my Theranos. It keeps my hot chocolate hot and my ice water cold.
Not thrilled with his whole “reduce the population by half” schtick though.
I do, however, think it’s kind of awesome how Gerard Butler and a bunch of half-naked men used it to kill a bunch of others.
But I do approve of Theranos’ “Loki killing” policy.
Theranos is ineviterable.
Theranos was right!
How do it know?
Oooof.
Aw snap, Sayid in the house! I can’t recall seeing him in anything since Lost.
He was on Sense8!
Like they said, they can’t recall seeing him on anything since Lost.
Oh yeah, forgot about that show! Only watched the first season, wasn’t really my thing.
Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos saga really is the motherlode for film writers/producers. What a fascinatingly bizarre person she is.
Maybe? I don’t think the audience is anywhere near what they seem to think it is. She’s interesting mostly to people who are really interested in tech and by now they’ve read the stories and watched the documentaries.
Took me until the end of the article to catch the double meaning of “The Dropout.” Must be having a slow day.
As someone who works in medicine, this is one of the dumbest things ever. It should have been … OK, your claim is that you can get accurate blood results from drops of blood versus the usual large pathology collections and regular testing. Compare blood tests from Theranos versus the regular methods taken from a series of patients and see if it works. The answer would obviously been it does not.But I get how these things take off because people don’t want to miss out. I’m guessing the hope was they’d eventually work it out in time with the funding they were going to get and then even if found out later, get forgiven because of all their success now. Well, that all went well.Mind you, this was even dumber:https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-22266225“A corrupt British businessman has been convicted of fraud after a jury found him guilty of a multi-million pound scam selling bogus bomb detecting equipment around the world.Iraq spent more than $40m (£26.2m) on 6,000 of Jim McCormick’s fake devices between 2008 and 2010.”“A CONMAN who raked in £50million from fake bomb detectors has been freed from jail early — and claims his only asset now is his lawnmower. James McCormick, 64, sold useless detectors made from £13 novelty golf ball finders for up to £27,000 a time.”Absolutely outrageous, people must have died from this and what’s even more unforgiveable was that it should have been immediately obvious for similar reasons that they didn’t work.
From what I remember of the book, I think one guy from Walgreens asked to see it and was constantly rebuffed before basically being told “we can’t share the machine because of trade secrets.” He raised the flag to his employers, but a lot of non-technical people made the decision to move forward with the deal.As an aside, this “fake it til you make it” philosophy seems to have gone from a last act of desperation to standard business practice. I think a lot of younger people (myself included) saw things like Amazon take a long time to turn a profit, or video games that are not done until the minute before deadline and figure that its just better to keep pushing forward and this shit will figure itself out. Its wrong and insane, but I cant help but feel that a lot of people, especially in Silicon Valley, think this way.
When I first heard about Theranos and their drop of blood technology, I thought “Great … if it works.”. I mean it’s theoretically possible, I guess? But since I also have a public health degree where we were taught basic statistics and evaluation methods, I also immediately thought “I’ll believe it when I see a series of credible studies comparing its results versus regular testing for the same thing.” and the longer it went on without it, the more I thought it was a scam.On a side note, the Marines on r/usmc on Reddit (and presumably elsewhere) deify General James Mattis (they had his face substituted on a biblical piece of art in the sidebar) but he was on the board of directors for Theranos or something like that which either means he was suckered into it or in on the grift. Neither is a good look.Oh and I found some more info on that bomb fraud business, it’s even worse than what I posted before.“The handheld devices were useless. Their antennae, which purported to detect explosives, and in other cases narcotics, were not connected to anything, they had no power source and one of the devices was simply the golf ball finder with a different sticker on it. Yet McCormick claimed they could detect explosives at long range, deep underground, through lead-lined rooms and multiple buildings. The devices were marketed at international trade fairs that were backed by UK government departments. It was also alleged that McCormick paid millions of pounds in bribes to senior Iraqis to secure the deals.”Seriously, none of these things are that hard to check which even basic due diligence, people!The market will sort itself out indeed.https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/15/earnings-from-fake-bomb-detectors-to-be-confiscated-judge-orders“The fraudster sold about 6,000 detectors to Iraq for as much as £10,000 each while the production cost for the device was as low as £15. He bought a mansion in Bath previously owned by the Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage, a holiday home in Cyprus and a Sunseeker yacht as part of assets worth £7m identified by police.”Oh of course he bought Nicolas Cage’s house.
But some of it wasn’t even theoretically possible. There are some tests that can’t be done with a finger prick because it can lyse cells and ruin the sample (not everything). People who pointed this out were ignored or told they were just naysayers with no vision. If you’re going to make an incredible claim then you need something to back it up.
And you have to mix the blood with a re active agent and there isn’t enough blood to do the mix correctly.
It genuinely makes me wonder what the starting point was for all this. Did Holmes see some kind of research about this being possible, theoretically or practically, and decide to build a company around it? Did she do research herself? Or was this some wishful thinking that she decided to sink some money into investigating and once it was found to be impossible she kept at it because she was in too deep? I highly suspect the latter, which is a problem.And to your point, Bad Blood pointed out (and I apologize if the facts are hazy, its been a few years since I read it and I am not a scientist) that the way she got around the small sample of blood was to dilute the ever-loving shit out of it to render a sample that was unusable because it was mostly solution.
I’ve listened to two podcasts, The DropOut, and Bad Blood, and from what I can remember it was an idea she chased. She claims it was because she lost a beloved uncle to cancer, it came on very quickly and he died. She wanted to invent a machine that could tell you about any illnesses you might be susceptible to, or have, as early as possible. But she knew people were afraid of needles and getting bloodwork done, etc. She talked to people at Stanford about this idea, one female professor in particular is quite amusing in her recollections. Holmes has no medical background, I don’t even recall if she was pre med. They couldn’t even use the Theranos boxes for blood tests to show investors, they would use 3rd party equipment because Theranos tests would be inaccurate more times than not.
“Hold on, lads! There may be an IED buried somewhere around here! Sergeant, call in the bomb detectors.”“Right away, sir!”“All right, Lance Corporal, go out there with your new handheld device and see what you find. And for God’s sake, be careful—I heard these devices cost us 27,000 quid.”minutes pass
“Lance Corporal, are you seeing anything!”“No IEDS yet, sir! Just a couple of golf ba—”EXPLOSION
She got that fake it til you make it stuff from Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle.Which is fine because Oracle is not telling women they had a miscarriage when they’re still pregnant, or telling people they are diabetic when they aren’t etc.
As a non medical person, every time I hear Holmes or someone on the podcast talk about how this machine would work, re hundreds of blood tests from a couple drops of blood, my head explodes. And then she led Schultz to believe that the machine could predict pancreatic cancer seventeen years before a tumor is detected.
Though some on social media were doubtful that Seyfried looked enough like Holmes to be a viable replacementMaybe we should stop evaluating casting this way?I’m reminded of what George RR Martin said when people were complaining that a lot of the actors initially cast in Game of Thrones didn’t have the right hair color for their characters. “It’s HBO. They have wigs.”
That said you can’t perfect the extremely unsettling stare Holmes had with a wig.However, Seyfried is pulling it off magnificently.
Yeah, I think she’s doing pretty well with the crazy-eyes, in that she’s not actually looking as crazy as Holmes.If she actually went as bug-eyed as Holmes it would look like parody. It’s one of those cases where reality is too extreme to be believable as fiction.
I frequently don’t believe Holmes is a real person when I see actual pictures of her.
…and Large Marge as Holmes!
I think if you want someone to seem just a little too intense to be entirely sane, Seyfried is a magnificent choice.
Yup, it really is a mind-numbingly uninteresting angle.I mean, Holmes might be a real person, but ultimately what’s happening here is that they’re turning her into a character. You want the real thing? Go watch the documentary.
What matters is: Will Amanda Seyfried do a good job of playing this character? And given her track record as an actor, I’d be very surprised if the answer is no.
It’s more important to capture the subject’s energy than to look exactly like them. No one really complains when an actor with only a passing resemblance gets the mannerisms and personality and other hard to define things right. But when the energy is off the lack of exact physical resemblance is the go-to complaint because it’s the easiest and most obvious thing to latch on to.
And sometimes it means going bigger than you’d think, especially for comedy. I remember Billy West talking about the Nixon voice he used on ‘Futurama’, which was not super accurate (being, as it was, “part werewolf”). But he mentioned all these other budding impressionists he met who could get the voice absolutely right, the problem being that it wasn’t funny.
Haaaaroooooooo
“(being, as it was, “part werewolf”)”Ok, now I need to see this episode.
Agreed. Sometimes the conversation about whether the actor looks enough like the real world counterpart is fine for sketches, bits and skits. But when a longer term performance is called for, that shouldn’t be the main determination about who gets the part. At that point, its more about CAN they do the performance.
I’m the same way when people complain casting Asian or Black actors will “ruin the realism.”
There’s dragons. And shapeshifters who go from human to animals. None of it is “real.”
He also said Dinklage was too talk to play Tyrion, so *shrug*
Yup. The real test will be if Seyfried can do that voice as well…
I thought they killed Theranos in Endgame.
Well, killed brought back and killed again.Much like Covid-19 then.
Something something multiverse.
I like the cut of your gib, son.
Retcon, baby…retcon!
This part should have gone to actress who identifies as a REAL Romulin.
I actually like Seyfried as an actor, but I’m a little Theranosed out. I read the book, listened to the podcast, watched the documentary, read up on the trail, so I think my obsession has played itself out. If McKinnon had stayed on, however, that probably would have revived it.
I use to get a good laugh at this tidbit to, but for a while I thought about letting it slide. I know many women often feel compelled to make themselves seem more masculine to be taken more serious. It’s not the worst thing she’s done, I’d put it that way. Then I listened to a recording were she slips and it was just too funny… I might be a bad person.
I read and loved the book, but haven’t really consumed any of the other media, so I am fully prepared for this series, and the Jennifer Lawrence movie.
Best. Halloween Costume. Ever.
Can Seyfried do the voice tho?
They’re going to get James Earl Jones.
They’re being very generous to Sunny Balwani in terms of the “looks department.”
I’ve been saying that this is perfect casting because Seyfried IS a little crazy (watch any talk show interview).
“You can’t just ask people why they’re white” remains one of the all-time great lines of cinematic comedy.
Nope. Whoever plays her needs a more dead-inside conwoman look, and Seyfried is lacking that.
does she do the fake deep voice?