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Amanda Seyfried plays Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu’s 'The Dropout,'
premiering March 2. “This is not just about showing all the points where this
woman made bad choices,” she says. “We’re investigating why we love a fall from
grace.” Seyfried was photographed Feb. 8 at Hudson Yards Lofts in New York.
Photographed by DAVID NEEDLEMAN
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WHY AMANDA SEYFRIED ORIGINALLY TURNED DOWN THE CHANCE TO PLAY ELIZABETH HOLMES

The Oscar-nominated actress explains why she initially said no to the prospect
of portraying the disgraced Theranos founder, how she managed to see through the
persona that fooled some of the tech world’s savviest investors — and why
nailing that distinctive voice wasn’t a priority.

By Mikey O'Connell

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MIKEY O'CONNELL

Senior Writer

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“I knew my voice was never going to be as deep as hers because I’m physically
not capable of it,” says Seyfried, before holding forth about vocal registers
with a clinical specificity that goes over my head. “Besides, I promised I
wasn’t going to give myself a hard time and try to completely mimic this other
human being. It’d be impossible. And just not fun.”

Fun is not the word that jumps to mind when describing Holmes’ 15-year
deception, which ranks among the most audacious financial frauds since Bernie
Madoff. Beginning in 2003, she pitched a miracle innovation that could run
hundreds of tests from a single drop of blood to some of the biggest names in
business and technology and raised more than $700 million despite having never
developed a working product. After Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou
exposed much of the wrongdoing at Theranos in 2015, the content dam burst. There
was a book (Carreyrou’s best-selling Bad Blood), a documentary (Alex Gibney’s
The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley) and a popular podcast (The
Dropout, from ABC News’ Rebecca Jarvis, on which much of the miniseries is
based).

“I watched and listened to all of it, but I learned nothing about her,” says
Seyfried. “It’s crazy that she can still be such an enigma with all the
information surrounding her.”

The specifics of Holmes’ career are now public record, but her interior — like
the machine she once hyped — long evaded the same scrutiny. Putting her at the
center of a TV show would require finding new cracks in the facade that tricked
so many people for so many years.

Screenwriter Elizabeth Meriwether, best known for creating the millennial sitcom
New Girl, was drawn to Holmes partly out of empathy. “I shared that experience
of being in a position of power before I knew what I was doing and then getting
in over my head,” says the Dropout showrunner, who was just 29 years old when
she created and ran New Girl. “There’s something here that I hadn’t seen on TV
before, a young woman enduring the pain and fear that comes with power — and not
in an empowering girlboss way.”

For Seyfried, The Dropout is as much an interrogation of schadenfreude as it is
an indulgence of it. “This is not just about showing all the points where this
woman made bad choices,” says Seyfried. “We’re investigating why we love a fall
from grace, why we want to watch train wrecks.”

Seyfried channelled Elizabeth Holmes, complete with black turtleneck, in The
Dropout. Beth Dubber/Hulu

Hollywood seems particularly keen to rubberneck these days. The Dropout will
test the consumer appetite for such stories when it premieres March 3. Other
upcoming Silicon Valley downfall dramas include Showtime’s Super Pumped: The
Battle for Uber, Apple TV+’s WeWork postmortem WeCrashed and HBO’s Facebook
indictment Doomsday Machine. There’s even another Theranos project in the works:
a long-gestating feature, from Adam McKay, with Jennifer Lawrence set to slip
into Holmes’ black Issey Miyake turtleneck.

“There’s this ubiquity of the creations of Silicon Valley, yet there’s still a
black box around how things there work and why it has gained so much power,”
says Jarvis. “People are eager to understand that world.”

When The Dropout was ordered in 2019, Kate McKinnon was attached to play Holmes.
But COVID-19 sparked years-long delays, and the Saturday Night Live MVP
eventually departed for another ripped-from-the-headlines miniseries: Peacock’s
Tiger King dramatization Joe vs Carole. Seyfried got the offer to jump in — and
promptly turned it down.

“Listen, I was having a fucking moment, OK?” she explains, laughing, during our
early-February Zoom. “I had COVID. I was isolating in the basement of a gross
townhouse in Savannah, Georgia, because my husband was working on a movie there.
And now an L.A. shoot? Pass!”

Amanda Seyfried Photographed by DAVID NEEDLEMAN

The actress insists she’s got nothing against L.A. She merely prefers to stick
close to home — which, for the past eight years, has been the upstate New York
farm she keeps with her husband (Broadway vet and The Newsroom star Thomas
Sadoski), their two children and a menagerie of animals.

Plus, Seyfried wasn’t exactly short on options at the time. The 36-year-old,
best known for her breakout turn in Tina Fey’s 2004 teen comedy Mean Girls and a
starring role in the blockbuster Mamma Mia! franchise, was doing the rounds for
her performance as jazz age actress Marion Davies in David Fincher’s Mank. The
film earned Seyfried her first Academy Award nomination — “a new foundation”
under her career, as the actress sees it, and one with which she’s still getting
comfortable.

But the next morning, her fever having broken, she called her agents with a
change of heart. “It’s really going to be difficult,” she thought. “It’s a huge
challenge. But I can’t believe that I get a challenge like this.'”

The announcement that a fresh Oscar nominee had come aboard put wind in the
stalled production’s sails. But no one had yet heard Seyfried so much as attempt
Holmes’ voice. Meriwether was already pegging most of her anxieties about The
Dropout on whether her lead would get too hung up on perfecting an
impersonation, unsure if she even wanted it to be that spot-on: “I was so
worried that getting the voice 100 percent right would distract from the actual
story, that it would become the focus.”

After watching deposition tapes and TED Talks, Seyfried began to get a feel for
Holmes’ posture — at once awkward and confident. She found her version of the
voice by recording memos on her iPhone while doling out hay to her various-sized
equines (there are big horses and mini horses as well as a donkey and a pony).
Producing director Michael Showalter got a few early previews — “She just
immediately clicked into that character,” he says — but no one else on The
Dropout knew what to expect until that first day of rehearsals. “The second she
opened her mouth,” Meriwether recalls, “I knew we had a show.”

Tracking Holmes from high school through her ascendance and ultimate undoing
required both a deep bench of supporting players — Naveen Andrews, most notably,
plays former Theranos president (and Holmes’ secret lover) Ramesh “Sunny”
Balwani — and a full eight episodes for the Searchlight TV/20th Television
drama. One hour is devoted almost solely to Holmes’ assuming her identity,
deepening her voice and shifting her wardrobe from Zuckerberg-esque hoodie and
“fuck-you flip-flops” to one reminiscent of Holmes’ hero, the late Steve Jobs.
Another episode, “Old White Men,” is told from the perspective of Walgreens
executives as they agree to surrender $140 million to Theranos despite never
having seen a proof of concept.

“You hear a lot of, ‘How did she get all these men on board with the company?
They must have been in love with her,’ ” says Meriwether. “That’s too simplistic
an answer for why everything happened.”

Holmes at the 2015 Fortune Global Forum in San Francisco. Kimberly White/Getty
Images

Showalter has a different one. “It’s the cult of personality,” he says of Holmes
and other tech-world maestros. “The obvious comparison would be our last
president, but it’s everywhere in the culture. You get a charismatic leader like
that, and suddenly everybody thinks they’re going to take them to the promised
land. It’s a cautionary tale, but it’s also an indictment of us.”

To fill in the story’s many gaps — and show how one woman could construct a ruse
that lasted so long, embroiling so many individuals — Meriwether and Seyfried
worked closely with Jarvis, who served as an executive producer on the
miniseries, before and during filming. They also conducted their own interviews
with people in Holmes’ orbit.

In August, the federal trial, United States v. Elizabeth A. Holmes, began in San
Jose, and overlapped with the production for six weeks. “It was always a little
tense, knowing information could come out during the trial that could just
change everything,” says Seyfried. “And then one night Liz just got this dump of
text messages that nobody had seen yet.”

The texts, about 500 pages’ worth of exchanges between Holmes and Balwani that
Meriwether received from ABC News producer Taylor Dunn as soon as they were
entered into evidence, did nothing to absolve either executive. Yet the
transcript did give the writer her first clear view into the relationship at the
center of her series. “I was always more interested in emotional moments between
them, so the revelation that she called him ‘tiger’ was really big for me,” says
Meriwether. “You’ll notice a lot more ‘tiger’ in the second half of the series.”

From left: Script coordinator Zach Panozzo, showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether and
actor Naveen Andrews on the Dropout set. Courtesy of Hulu

Production wrapped without any bombshells from the trial, and none came as
courtroom proceedings stretched into the new year. After more than a week of
deliberation, a jury found Holmes guilty on four counts of defrauding investors.

Jarvis covered the trial for a sequel podcast and was there Jan. 3 as the
verdict was read. For her, the story has a resonance beyond the particulars of
what Holmes did. “Elizabeth created Theranos at a time when young people without
a huge amount of experience were suddenly being given millions or even billions
of dollars,” says Jarvis. “She’s become this cultural touchstone in the genesis
of all these companies and products that we just kind of take for granted.”

The Silicon Valley CEO, real and fictionalized, has shifted from hero to villain
in pop culture. “This is a moment of reckoning for tech companies,” says
Meriwether. “I’m 40, so I remember those candy-colored Apple computers, getting
a cellphone in college and Facebook starting. There was a sense of awe around
these companies, that they could do no wrong. We’re only just starting to
question that mania. I fully bought into it, and I feel a little bit duped.”

***

Seyfried still wrestles with how she feels about her alter ego and the
consequences she faces (up to 20 years in prison) at her scheduled sentencing on
Sept. 5. The actress says she tried to withhold judgment while filming. And now,
having put so much effort into humanizing a convicted criminal, she doesn’t like
to think about what lies ahead for Holmes.

“It’s just a bummer,” says Seyfried, who keeps in touch with one individual
still close to Holmes — though she declines to say whom. “She made bad choices,
and she’s got to be held accountable. But it’s nuanced, like everything and
everybody.”

Seyfried was herself something of a wunderkind. A working actress in her teens,
she was only 20 when Mean Girls launched her onto the A-list. I ask her how much
she relates to Holmes’ impatience to succeed, a character trait that The Dropout
and ample reporting suggest played a key role in her con.

“I am the opposite,” she says, without taking a breath. “I have ambition and I
work hard, but I’ve never felt like time was running out. As an actor, you’re
always afraid that people are going to forget about you. But, in my experience,
there’s always going to be a new generation coming up. I just want to hold my
place.”

Seyfried would also like people to not get so hung up on “the voice,” and not
even for reasons related to her performance. It’s Elizabeth Holmes’ one
deception that the actress does not blame her for. “If you’re trying to be taken
seriously by all of these powerful men, what else do you do? We all take on
traits, subconsciously most of the time, to fit in and survive,” she says. “I
caught myself doing some her mannerisms just the other day. You can’t help it.
We’re sensitive. We’re absorbent. We’re fucking humans.”

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