Few scandals in recent memory have captured the public’s attention quite like the dramatic fall from grace of Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes, of course, is the Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose health-tech start-up, Theranos, falsely promised a revolutionary new blood-testing method and went from being valued at $9 billion—making Holmes the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire—to zero. Following a series of high-profile exposés by The Wall Street Journal, along with the hit podcast The Dropout and Alex Gibney’s documentary The Inventor on HBO, the Theranos debacle became a highlight of 2019’s so-called summer of scam, alongside the dealings of Anna Delvey and Fyre Festival.
So it was only a matter of time before a fictional retelling of Holmes’s story hit our screens—and yesterday we got our first glimpse of Hulu’s spin, The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried. (The creators of the eponymous podcast are serving as executive producers on the limited series, which will premiere on March 3, 2022.) In new images from the show, described as “an unbelievable tale of ambition and fame gone terribly wrong,” we see Seyfried with a number of Holmes’s distinguishing features: her heavy eyeliner, red lipstick, straight blonde hair, and most notably, the signature black turtleneck she wore to model herself after Steve Jobs, her hero.
By coincidence or fate, Holmes herself is currently in the thick of her fraud trial, with her lawyers concluding their defense yesterday at a courtroom in San Jose; if convicted, she could face up to 20 years in prison. Some of the most shocking revelations to come out of Holmes’s seven days of testimony were her allegations of an abusive relationship with her former boyfriend and business partner, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, who will also be facing trial next year. In the images released this week, Lost’s Naveen Andrews appears as Balwani in The Dropout, although how their relationship will be interpreted in the series remains to be seen.
This isn’t the only Holmes project currently in the works either. Jennifer Lawrence was recently announced as the star of Adam McKay’s adaptation of John Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, which has been snapped up by Apple Studios. As to which of these two Hollywood A-listers will deliver the more convincing performance as the tech world’s most controversial woman? Seyfried has already made an impressive start.
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