With Kate McKinnon out, Amanda Seyfried to play kooky Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu's The Dropout
TV Features Elizabeth Holmes
Hulu has found a new Elizabeth Holmes. On Monday, Deadline reported that Amanda Seyfried will replace Kate McKinnon in the limited series about the fraudster Theranos founder. This news a month after McKinnon, who was also set to be one of the show’s executive producers. (The Saturday Night Live actress decided to leave the series for undisclosed reasons, though it’s been reported it was due to scheduling issues.) Seyfried started out on soap operas before roles on Veronica Mars and Big Love, but this will be her first live-action TV role since Twin Peaks: The Return. The actress will also serve as a producer on the series, which is based on ABC News’ podcast about the rise and fall of Theranos, exposing Holmes’ scamming. Holmes, who was also the subject of Alex Gibney’s HBO documentary The Inventor, was indicted by a federal jury in 2018 on nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
McKinnon admittedly resembled Holmes a lot more than Seyfried, but maybe if Seyfried can get the frazzled facial expressions and weird, low voice down, she could be a convincing Holmes. It’s been a big year for Seyfried already. The actor received her first Oscar nomination for playing another real-life person, Citizen Kane star Marion Davies, in David Fincher’s Mank. Seyfried also stars in Netflix’s upcoming thriller Things Heard And Seen. The film is an adaptation of Elizabeth Brundage’s All Things Cease to Appear and features Seyfried as a young woman who moves to a small town with her husband and finds out her home harbors sinister secrets.
According to Deadline, Hulu is “eyeing a summer start” for The Dropout.
43 Comments
She definitely won’t be as good with the voice as Kate would’ve been.
I think you need a really skilled comic actress to accurately capture Holmes’ weird energy. Seyfried may surprise me but I’ve never seen her do anything like that. Most of her roles are pretty straight and similar… Even in Twin Peaks she just seemed like “Hey, it’s Amanda Seyfried.”
Me, I think it’s a perfect role for Gillian Jacobs. Or even a blonde Alison Brie.
Are you forgetting Seyfried’s breakout role in Mean Girls?
Mean Girls.
Karen Gillian, she’d be great at the voice too.
Frankly Jennifer Lawrence would smash it too, hence her casting in the McKay movie.
I made it through about fifteen minutes of the documentary before giving up out of boredom. Does anyone find this story even half as compelling as production companies and media outlets find this story? Some libertarian fuckwits who are living indictments of the federal tax system gave a huckster with a stupid idea a bunch of money. It’s just the same stupid shit as Juicero, but this time with tits, big whoop.
It really isn’t the same, and if you’d watch more than the fifteen minutes you’d know it.Holmes didn’t do the classic grift of overpromising that sinks most start-ups like Juicero did. She went all in by going on an almost movie-like confidence game by fabricating her entire persona and selling the product on the basis of herself. The product of Theranos wasn’t some machine, it was Elizabeth Holmes herself.AND her actions were infinitely more tragic than shit like Juicero or any other boring start-up, since outside of essentially grifting sick people her actions indirectly caused a man to commit suicide, among other things. The victims aren’t so rich old farts from Sillicon Valley, but normal people.I still don’t think it would make for a great film – even if it made for some great podcasts and docs – but to compare Theranos to the Juicero situation is to both massively underestimate what this entire con was about AND to undersell the tragedy she brought onto many, many people.
to me the big story here was how she duped so many “smart” people into believing her bullshit because…they found her attractive? She has the patina of genius? I don’t get it, I found her hubris extremely off-putting (and by the end of the documentary I was also wondering if she had some rare form of bipolar + narcissism), but it’s weird how sometimes people will only see what they want to see.
For one, she aimed her con at a lot of old men, and I mean farts like Kissinger and James Mattis. They likely looked at her face, paid barely any attention to what she was talking about (because they didn’t know shit) and “liked her spunk”.Secondly, folks in tech love no one else more than rapturous motherfuckers who talk a big game about their vision and seem decisive, cutthroat even. Steve Jobs was a sociopathic cunt who built a cult of personality around him that endures to this day, even though if he were still alive he’d be getting roasted to oblivion right now and Apple would be scrambling to get him to leave and never come back in a way that won’t lose them any more money – and every start-up grifter since had tried to emulate him.Hell, even honest folks do – Adam Neumann of WeWork is a great example. Neumann for all intents and purposes didn’t start WeWork to con folks out of money, but after investors and media crowned him the Jesus of startups he absolutely ate it up and lost any semblance of common sense, which lead to his legend imploding so fast.Basically, they are all assholes.
yeah the fetishization of tech companies (and I suppose capitalism as well by extension) really accelerated this debacle as well. It’s weird to think even established old farts like Schulz and Kissinger could be duped relatively easily with the “game-changing technology that was also literally too good to be true” scam. (and BTW, Steve Jobs dying was probably the best thing he could have done for his legacy because the sociopathic prick part of his legend will be forgotten or minimized, and the Zen master part will be accentuated.)
The book is pretty interesting and scratches a little deeper than “the bug-eyed woman with the deep voice lied to some rich folk.” If you’re actually curious about this beyond “who cares,” you might get something out of it.Overall the narrative is familiar in the startup world; just look at WeWork. You have a charismatic and overoptimistic figurehead promising a new future, investors pumping them so full of money that what they have to deliver can be no less than an industry-wide revolution, they try to undercut costs by bullshitting their way into leveraging existing resources (eg car drivers with Uber, existing rentable office buildings with WeWork, Walgreens with Theranos), and then eventually the bottom falls out and the figurehead flames out spectacularly.
Except unlike Juicero, Theranos’ work actually lead to at least one person dying because of bad blood work. Personally I found the Theranos story fascinating, I find all these Silicon Valley rise and fall stories fascinating, because I’m continually astounded rich idiots invest in some of these companies. Take Soylent Green, all that shit is is Carnation Instant Breakfast or Slim Fast (or any other dozen+ protein shake mixes on the market), but some dude bros come along, use flashy buzzwords like “biohacking”, package it up and target it to other dude bros instead of families and women, and somehow it’s now an “innovative” “disrupter”. The hubris of Silicon Valley (or those trying to break into it, ex. an old law school pal started a company that I continually remain shocked anyone is interested in as the idea is so slight, but she’s gotten millions in funding) is a never ending resource apparently.
The instant-food is Soylent, not Soylent Green. It may be a scam, but at least it isn’t people.
Hahha, oops typo!
Starred because I did the same. And I’m not usually like that with docs.
I finished the whole thing, but it’s one of my least favorite films of its year. It is one of the flattest major documentaries in recent memory.
I think it’s a compelling story just because of how extreme the fraud was and how many generally reputable people it took in. It’s not a case like WeWork (or probably Juicero too), where they didn’t lie about the basics of the business, just tried to make a dull idea seem visionary – it’s instead a case of lying to everybody about the actual product and relentlessly hounding anyone who tried to blow the whistle.
That said, I have no idea how this works as a limited biopic series.
honestly, it didn’t strike me as anything more interesting than a standard ponzy scheme. they had a ‘sure fire’ investment, gussied up a bunch of fake reports on how great it was, kept on selling it until it finally got too big and then didn’t cash out before it all came tumbling down. its basically one narration by stacy keach jr away from an episode of american greed
I thought the book was great, but I also don’t know how it works as a biopic.
Holmes seemed to be a shadow of her idol, Steve Jobs, who was a freak but a compelling one. The book suggests there wasn’t a lot to her — her appeal to investors seemed to be in her ability to mirror back at them their own empty expectations. I’m not sure there is a lot of drama in her, and that seems like a big risk unless the director is really good.
Yes! How many streaming docs can we hate-watch? If there’s no budget for a superhero movie, just make another doc. They sell!
The thing is microfluidics is a real thing and it will revolutionize medicine at some point (even if it will almost assuredly still require more than a pinprick of blood, not being magical). We will eventually test ourselves on a daily basis, at home, for all sorts of diseases and health issues, just as we check our weight and blood pressure today. The really frustrating thing about Theranos is it probably delayed this future by a decade or more because anyone suggesting work on a similar system will get laughed at and told to take their “scam” elsewhere.
I read the book, listened to the podcast, thought the story was fascinating. But I found the documentary awful. It was boring and it didn’t explain WHY any of this was happening. If you hadn’t read the book you’d have no idea who this person was for the first half of the doc. It did have a lot of video of Holmes walking down a hallway though. And HBO loves that shit.
God bless her. That voice is gonna be hell on the pipes.
Just take a puff of sulfur hexafluoride before every take.
Yeah, she’s a great actress, but I can’t see Seyfried pulling that off without permanently damaging her voice or sounding ridiculous (in a less-funny way than Holmes did). Or both.
I thought Jennifer Lawrence was attached to an Elizabeth Holmes film. I seem to recall Adam McKay’s name being floated to direct. Is there more than one project in the works, or just the one that has evolved? Whatever the case may be, I hope Holmes doesn’t get a dime from this.
Yeah, Seyfried is a good actress but this part is perfect for Lawrence…I almost kind of want to see a version with…Lauren Lapkus?
That is another project, by Mckay, that will be a movie with Lawrence. This one will be a miniseries. Although it’s been a while since Mckay has said anything about it, so it could be a while until we get the movie version.
Lauren Lapkus would be genius casting, actually. Don’t get me wrong, the Wrong Missy was a terrible movie, but Lapkus really showed promise by what she did with a crap part. She could switch the crazy on and off, and exuded these qualities that defined Holmes as a person, namely being magnetic, cultish and more than a little nutty.
I thought it was going to be Ashton Kutcher as Holmes and Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak. I may be mixed up.
I actually think this is a much better fit than McKinnon would have been. Yeah, Kate would probably done a better job with the voice, but there was so much more to Holmes than that. And I’ll be honest, to me Kate doesn’t have that energy you need to carry Holmes, especially the way she appealed to the investors.
I imagine/fantastize that Kate McKinnon will someday deliver dramatic performances like Kristin Wiig. But it’s too easy to imagine her doing Elizabeth Holmes as a caricature, because Holmes’ public persona is itself a caricature. Maybe Amanda Seyfried has the acting chops to find the chilling, shameless, self justified humanity in what seemed to be an attractive alien obsessed with collecting human blood.
I guess what is confusing to me is that with McKinnon it did seem like it was going to be more a comedic take down. Seyfried isn’t just a new actor, but a seemingly whole new direction. (And I, personally, do not even a little bit believe she is up to the challenge. Nothing personal, she’s just good at what she is good at.)
My thing with making the Theranos story a comedy is that it teeters on the edge of mockery, and the problem here is that Holmes was fucking around with human life. Directly. Not their finances, not some esoteric political idea, people actually died because of her grift – both because of those fucking machines AND because she put the entire pressure on one honest researcher who killed himself because of the stress. Like, if you wanna make a comedy, it might work as something akin to The Wolf of Wall Street, where the film starts off as an already very dark black comedy until it goes so off the rails that the already nervous laughs become a defense mechanism. But McKinnon’s involvement made me think it was gonna be zany in a wrong way – mostly because while I like her, I’m not at all convinced of her dramatic chops and have been tired of how she’s used on SNL in the past few years.
>McKinnon admittedly resembled Holmes a lot more than Seyfried, but maybe if Seyfried can get the frazzled facial expressions and weird, low voice down, she could be a convincing Holmes.tbh I don’t really care how accurately an actor physically resembles the person they’re supposed to be playing as long as the basic physical characteristics match (gender, skin colour, height, weight, etc.). Seyfried is a *much* better actress than McKinnon so this can only be a good thing as far as I’m concerned.
The thing I like about this casting is Amanda has just enough actual “crazy” in her to pull this off (see just about ANY interview).
I guess I can be the one to mention that Marion Davies wasn’t in Citizen Kane. There was a character in Citizen Kane that was based on her, but she was played by Dorothy Comingore.
From an acting talent standpoint, this seems to be a major upgrade.
I’m a doctor (not in pathology) and I never really understood how all this got so far. As product testing goes, this seemed one of the easier ones to prove it worked/didn’t work.Take blood from a patient for the Theranos method and take more blood separately from the same patient to use for the conventional method.If Theranos kept failing/had statistically insufficient numbers of results that matched current blood testing, well then obviously it doesn’t work and stop giving them money if the failures kept happening and no improvement was seen.Though I guess I was missing how the whole salesmanship/exaggerated claims/straight up con-artistry spectrum of pitch meetings worked to separate all these people from their money even though the path to seeing if all this worked at all was right there from the start. It’s why even though I thought it was theoretically possible in theory, I was skeptical until conclusive proof was demonstrable shown – which in the end of course it never was going to be.(Though I also suppose there was the whole ‘we’ve almost got it bar a few a complications so we need some more investment money we’ll have results soon’ rinse and repeat method probably strung people along for a long time too.)
For me, part of the appeal of this story is the schadenfreude of it all. As you point out, it never should have gotten this far. I am an auditor and if I ask a client for support and keep getting a spreadsheet with no documentation, I get suspicious too. That it kept going on the force of her personality and the promise of what it could do and the idea that “its so revolutionary, we can’t explain it, but it totally works” should be an indictment of Silicon Valley and the stupid amount of money they throw at dumb projects. It also perpetuates this idea of “fake it til you make it” as a legitimate way to conduct business, which is nuts to me.I would also like to point out that I know people lost their lives as a result of this and that is inexcusable and tragic – I am not trying to say in any way that it’s “good” they died to teach these companies a lesson. I suppose a normal human being would look at the devastation this whole debacle wrought and either feel some shame or self-reflection that leads to better choices. Since no one involved in this seems to be a normal human being, other than the whistle-blowers and initial doubters, I doubt that will be the case and that makes it that more tragic.
The culture of tech startups and venture capital is “fake it till you make it.” I have worked on multi-million dollar product launches where teams are still working on basic user interface a couple weeks before the go-live date. Surprisingly, this works a lot of the time, and usually the worst that happens is you get a piece of software – a gaming app or a work collaboration platform or even an enterprise level SIEM – that’s a little buggy. The big problem with Theranos is this casual hubris collided with a completely different universe – healthcare. You can’t “fake it till you make it” with healthcare. Either something works or it doesn’t. And the stakes are much higher. There were a whole bunch of other factors – Holmes’ “breeding” coming from a line of successful entrepreneurs and business executives, her family connections to huge names in both tech and DC (including the likes of Henry Kissinger and James Mattis), FOMO on the next Steve Jobs (whom she deliberately patterned herself after and frequently invoked), old fashioned grift, even the innate charms of being a conventionally attractive young white woman. But I think one of the most interesting is the assumption that what will work in one industry culture will blow up in another.
I love them both, but Seyfried seems like a tradeup here. Also, Seyfried needs to generally be in more stuff. What a wonderful and talented actress she is.