If you happen to see Amanda Seyfried walking around town wearing a black turtleneck and speaking in her lowest vocal register, don’t be surprised. Per Deadline, the Oscar-nominated Mank actor has been cast as disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the forthcoming Hulu limited drama series The Dropout. It’s no small task to make the multi-octave leap from Cosette’s soprano to Holmes’s manufactured contralto, but we believe Seyfried has the range.
Based on the ABC News podcast of the same name, The Dropout will follow the rise and fall of the notorious Silicon Valley wunderkind, whose state-of-the-art blood-testing start-up, Theranos, once valued at $9 billion, was found to be based on faulty technology, endangering the lives of thousands. The series will chart how the now 37-year-old Holmes went from the “youngest self-made female billionaire” to a defendant in a class action lawsuit seemingly overnight.
Seyfried is taking over the role from SNL’s Kate McKinnon, who dropped out of The Dropout in February due to scheduling conflicts. Seyfried will also serve as a producer on the show from Disney Television Studios’ 20th Television and Searchlight. New Girl creator Elizabeth Meriwether is executive producing the project, which received a straight-to-series order from Hulu in 2019. Shooting is set to begin sometime this summer.
This is far from the only high-profile Hollywood project about the life and times of Elizabeth Holmes. She was previously the subject of the 2019 HBO documentary The Inventor; Jennifer Lawrence is also set to play Holmes in the film Bad Blood, based on Jon Carreyrou’s 2018 book of the same name, which chronicles Holmes’s spectacular fall from grace. As for Holmes herself, she recently asked the court for a delay in her criminal fraud trial due to her pregnancy. (She married William Evans, an heir to the Evans Hotel Group, in 2019.) Holmes’s trial, in which she and her former lover and Theranos COO, Sunny Balwani, each face a dozen charges of criminal wire fraud, has already been delayed three times due to COVID-19. If convicted, she could face up to 20 years in prison.
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