Two years ago, it was announced that Kate McKinnon would be playing Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the Hulu limited series, The Dropout. She was also going to be one of the show’s executive producers. It seemed like the perfect casting decision; McKinnon looks enough like her and excels at playing weirdos. But alas, nothing gold from pre-pandemic times can stay. On Thursday evening, Deadline announced that McKinnon dropped out of The Dropout. No context was given as to why she decided to not go through with playing the wunderkind-turned-fraudster, but contractual breakdowns have become somewhat of a fixture in the COVID era, with schedules being shuffled by the halts in production.
A source told Deadline that even with this last-minute snag to production plans, the limited series is still in the works. There must be another blue-eyed blonde available in Hollywood, right?
And if you were dead-set on seeing McKinnon play a real-life kook, don’t worry. She’s still tapped to play Joe Exotic’s nemesis Carole Baskin in NBC’s upcoming Tiger King-based TV show, Joe Exotic.
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Read as “Thanos”, terribly confused.
I was so looking forward to seeing McKinnon beat the crap out of the Avengers . . . .
“You aren’t going to win, Thanos!”“Wenowdis!”
The Hands of Fate?
Aw dang, I feel like she could’ve nailed the voice perfectly and yeah it wouldn’t take much to make her look like Holmes. Eh but yeah there’s no shortage of pretty blonde talented ladies in Hollywood trying to get a break
“We need a young blonde that can constantly look like she’s spaced out and as if she combs her hair with an eggbeater!”
I mean, Tilda Swinton is right there.
She’s versatile, but playing a 20-year-old CEO would be difficult for Tilda when every character she’s played up to now has been ageless.
Jennifer Lawrence, y’all!
Yeah, Jennifer Lawrence seems born for the role.
The main problem with Jennifer Lawrence is that whenever I see her in anything I just sort of see her, rather than a character.
I think that would have been the problem with McKinnon, too.
I feel like I remember reading that Jennifer Lawrence was doing an Elizabeth Holmes movie with Adam McKay, but it seems like that got pushed back on account of Don’t Look Up
IIRC, she’s playing Holmes in another project based on this whole thing.
So, she’s playing Holmes in a movie about Holmes reacting to the casting changes to the Theranos movie? Sounds terrible!
I’m more interested in who will be playing George Schultz, as he also played a role in the Theranos story. I would have said Christopher Plummer, but he (along with the actual Schultz) is no longer with us, dying within a day of each other.
I was looking at it as “Thanos” too. And came up with this tagline: “If you can fool half of the people…”Pay me please, Hulu.
I, like much of America, was obsessed with Tiger King a year ago, and I’ve listened to the podcasts, watched the doc, and read the book about Theranos … but reading this, I was like, “Oh, yeah, that … they’re still making a show about that?” I feel like we’ll be thinking the same two years from now, when all of these announced GameStop shows/films drop …
I am actually fascinated by the Theranos story, but not excited to watch it get rehashed again. The actual story is wild enough, we don’t need a dramatized version of it, and there’s frankly nothing left to uncover. I do think Theranos is going to be discussed and addressed for far longer than Tiger King but that’s more because it’s a lesson in doing more due diligence before assuming the lady with the deep voice who is unhealthily obsessed with Steve Jobs must know what she’s doing.
Particularly since Steve Jobs isn’t exactly a great model for a health professional given that Jobs chose to treat his cancer with bogus “holistic” treatments rather than scientifically backed medicine.
I think it survives for a long time, exactly because it’s a neat, easy, way to address many of the things that make people hesitant about Silicon Valley tech and culture, for which we’re usually called dinosaurs or communists. – A person with no experience or direct training promises to completely change a field she knows nothing about. – It magically makes an expensive industry, full of trained jobs, way cheaper because all those people are replaced with an ipod (bye bye phlebotomists, lab techs, nurses, medical techs, family doctors and pharmacists!)-Push a button, get the right answer! That’s what science is!-Trend chasing. She said she wanted to be the Steve Jobs of medicine, and all the investors came to her. A bunch of people from the same few schools telling each other how brilliant they are. It was all super obvious fake, and it wasn’t like she was some brilliant mastermind. You read the book, literal B.Scs working at their first job out of university were saying “Yeah, this is garbage.” She’s not Lex Luthor. She’s Slippin Jimmy and we refuse to see it because we’re blinded by Tech! Computers! Data! Stanford! And a tiny bit of due diligence could have blown the whole thing up.
I’m obsessed with hoaxes, so I read the Theranos news like it was my job. I can’t see myself watching a dramatised version, because the real story is nuts enough. I could see them doing something like The Big Short, where it’s basically a glorified documentary.
If you’re in to hoaxes, you should watch Lady and The Dale documentary on HBO!The protagonist, although also a megalomaniac fraudster who knowingly took peoples’ money for a non-existent product, is a lot more sympathetic (and even tragic) than Holmes.
I liked it a lot but thought it went too far to make her sympathetic, to the extent that they pretty much ignored the batshit libertarianism that motivated her until it was discussed as a kind of aside in the last episode.
Yeah that’s fair – although I read her libertarianism as more of a paranoid “big government is out to get me” strain than the Rand Paul “fck the poor” strain. I wonder how much of her obsession with free enterprise, no regulation, and outright law-breaking was born of her being trans in a hostile time – ie “society/the law can’t even respect/understand my fundamental identity, why should I listen to them about how I run my business?”
Agreed on the ‘big government’ strain rather than ‘F the poor’, tho one does generally feed into the other.I *think* the last episode did put a little work connecting her trans identity into her libertarianism? To the extent that it made me wonder if there is a substantial cohort of transgendered libertarians.
Or maybe a dramatic film from the perspective of, say, a researcher for a VC company trying to do due diligence on Thanatos? Centering these around Holmes seems like an excuse to let an actress do a Holmes imitation (and frankly runs the risk of making her more sympathetic, which I think some of the docs and podcasts about this did).
Yeah the Theranos stuff is really interesting–John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood is an excellent book–but I don’t think it would make a compelling film. The like 30 Theranos documentaries that came out a couple years back pretty much have it covered.
Theranos keeps on giving, since the people involves are teh type that turn up elsewhere instead of going away. For example, James Mattis was on the board of Theranos… and then was Secretary of Defense.
She’s perfect for this role, but at the same time McKinnon doing these over the top impressions is getting kind of stale. Might be better to see someone else in the role right now.
I feel like the project wouldn’t actually be served by Kate McKinnon doing her Kate McKinnon SNL thing. Doing the voice, turning Holmes into a cartoon, would probably undersell how disturbing the whole thing was. It needs someone who plays Holmes absolutely straight.
True – we have to be able to believe that serious investors took her seriously for it to work.
“Wunderkind-turned-fraudster”? That’s being a little generous. She was as much of a Wunderkind as the organizer of the Fyre festival.
“Fraudster-briefly-thought-by-some-to-be-a-wunderkind”
How good must the money be to keep working on that Tiger King show when most people moved on from that show months ago?
But, she’s like the only person who could play that weirdo.
image search for kate mckinnon young and there’s a photograph of her Twitter Wishing Boot / HAPPY KATE YEAR on Twitter: “status: thinking … the photograph was carefully posed with her face turned just enough to show the overlay of a biometric face map with sufficient data points to identify a woman the photograph is a girl probably a teenager pushing a baggage trolly through airport arrivals given the fact that this is obviously a kill picture of a teenage girl tortured and murdered by your employers Ms. McKinnon I’m surprised you were alive at all after this photograph was originally used I’d have killed you immediately then and now I’d definitely kill you once more I call for the murder of Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris it seems unlikely that this time any United States military officers will write in their biographies fifteen years later yeah sure we all knew George W. Bush was a fucking moron Dick Cheney a sadist Donald Rumsfeld mentally ill we were just following orders
I guess we’ll just have to settle for the other 17 TV adaptations of the Theranos collapse.
Please, hire Chloe Fineman!!!