The Dropout

I refuse to identify with Holmes, but the cool girls on my abroad program also didn't like me. Sisters in solidarity! Did Amanda Seyfried actually learn ...

2002 was a crazy time.If there’s one thing I don’t miss about college, it’s a cappella.This scene of Holmes practicing having a normal conversation in the mirror is quite heartbreaking!God, I’m very stressed out and saddened by this sexual-assault storyline.Holmes’s mom’s advice to “just put it away and forget it” does not seem super helpful?And now, voilà, we have a whole new Holmes and Theranos! “Just a drop.” Sounds nice, doesn’t it?Balwani comes back into the picture after Holmes’s car window gets shot out in the “bad” neighborhood she’s renting in to launch her startup.Okay, I kind of mess with this show so far! Reading’s stupid, TV rules.Holmes is schooling some graduate students on flow rate (???), and a kindly professor is impressed and lets her scam her way into his advanced class.Okay, so Laurie Metcalf told Holmes when she was still in college that the basic idea for Theranos wouldn’t work...yet nevertheless, she persisted. Sisters in solidarity!Did Amanda Seyfried actually learn Mandarin for this role?Damn, I didn’t really know Balwani was this much older than Holmes.God, all this (unconsummated) romance between Holmes and Balwani takes place before she’s even a freshman at Stanford. Oof.Now Holmes is at Stanford, having boring and rhythmic sex to the strains of Justin Timberlake. What a time to be alive!She’s still in contact with Balwani, who I don’t think she’s ever slept with?God, I simply cannot relate to loving or being interested in science. Just lie like a normal person!Then again, I guess the entire point of this show is that Holmes wasn’t a normal person, so it’s good exposition.Nothing this show invents could ever be as funny as Balwani and Holmes’s real texts.Aw, the cool girls in Holmes’s Beijing program are making fun of her for...speaking Mandarin? Excuse her for having drive!I refuse to identify with Holmes, but the cool girls on my abroad program also didn’t like me. I’ll admit I’ve grown somewhat weary of the season of the scammer—or at least the way it’s depicted onscreen. And her deer-in-headlights look.Okay, the voice is good, I’ll give her that.Theranos is...a mix between therapy and diagnosis?

New take on the crooked Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is the best of the current wave of true-crime limited series.

The artistry of “The Dropout” is that while it never makes excuses for Holmes and shines a harsh spotlight on her bizarre behavior and sociopathic-level lack of empathy, we see her as a three-dimensional human being who had unlimited potential and probably WOULD have achieved something great had she listened to those who were trying to get her to slow down and do things the right way. But as Theranos grows in scope and ambition, Elizabeth undergoes a remarkable and at times chilling self-makeover, from her trademark black-on-black fashion to her brutal treatment of employees to the evolution of her voice to the point where she almost sounds as if she’s imitating a man. Elizabeth drops out of Stanford, convinces her parents to pour all of her tuition money into Theranos and begins rounding up personnel to staff the lab while she courts investors.At this point, Seyfried as Holmes looks and acts the part of a super-bright but unsophisticated teenager, from her dance-to-iPod-music energy to her ultra-casual clothes to her girlish speaking voice. “The Dropout” kicks off with Holmes giving a deposition in July of 2017, flashes back to a few telling moments from Holmes’ youth — gamely completing a race long after everyone else has long since crossed the finished line, learning Mandarin on tape on the ride home from high school — before picking up the story in the early 2000s, with Elizabeth about to enter Stanford just as her father Chris (Michael Gill) is getting laid off from the collapsing Enron. With the help of a family friend, the eccentric and perpetually resentful physician and inventor Richard Fuisz (William H. Macy), Elizabeth will still be able to attend Stanford, but first she takes a trip to Beijing, where she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani (Naveen Andrews), a millionaire tech entrepreneur nearly twice her age.Once Elizabeth enrolls in Stanford, she becomes highly impatient with the natural progression of things. In 2014, Holmes was named one of the richest women in America by Forbes, with an estimated personal wealth of $4.5 billion; by 2018, her net worth was $0 and the SEC had charged her with “massive fraud,” which eventually resulted in four convictions.The story of Holmes and her monumental failures with the blood-testing enterprise Theranos has been thoroughly chronicled via just about every platform imaginable, and yet there’s something lively and fresh about “The Dropout.” With Amanda Seyfried in a career-best performance, brilliant supporting work from the expansive supporting cast, crisp writing and first-rate production values, this is the real thing — unlike the sham medical technology Holmes peddled (and sold) to people who should have known better. With the first three episodes already streaming and subsequent chapters premiering weekly, this is an immensely entertaining and easily digestible chronicle of true-life events — and a fascinating psychological profile of a bizarre huckster and her breathtakingly wide-ranging long con, in which she duped scientists, investors and institutions, in the process becoming a media darling as a young, female tech “unicorn” smashing the glass ceiling.

Amanda Seyfried certainly had the large blue eyes and blonde hair to play Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder and fraud who bilked investors out of millions ...

I was a musician in a band, and stepping onstage in different makeup and wardrobe transformed me from Jorjee Douglass to a persona…I feel like that’s what she did.”Douglass also used tidbits of dialogue from The Dropout’s scripts to understand why Holmes might have chosen red lipstick in the first place.“I think she was drawn to the red because, growing up, she had a mom who was like, ‘You look better when your hair is lightened,’ or, ‘You look better when you wear lipstick,’” says Douglass. “I think she always had this mother kind of nudging her to look more feminine, and when she finally did it, she was like, ‘I’m going to wear this traditional tart face because this is how I’m going to sell. I think sometimes she went to bed with her makeup on and that’s why sometimes it was very clumpy, because she’d wake up and kind of refresh herself as best as she could.”To authentically create makeup that looks as though it was done quickly, Douglass applied a layer of cosmetics to Holmes and then, maybe three hours later, piled more on without removing any of the previous layers—giving Seyfried mascara clumps the textured look of someone who hadn’t washed her face the night before.To replicate Holmes’s imperfect lipstick application, says Douglass, “I used liquid lipstick, sometimes not using the liner so it would bleed or fall out of line. And then sometimes I would use liner to draw a line that went off to a side.” If you look closely on The Dropout, Seyfried’s lips are drawn more raggedly when the character became more manic because of stress.Seyfried herself would have happily gone to further cosmetically destructive lengths to transform herself into Holmes. Douglass says that Seyfried volunteered her immaculate blonde hair as follicular tribute, telling hair department head Vanessa Price to fry and dry her out so she’d look more like Holmes in later Theranos days.“She was like, ‘If you want, we can just fry up my hair. I think we should do that, you know?’”Recalls Douglass, “Of course the hair girl was like, ‘No.’” Not only because that would have damaged the actor’s hair, but because the series was not filmed in chronological sequence, and Seyfried needed to toggle between scenes set in Holmes’s early-aughts college days and her recent 2018 deposition. This is how I’m going to weaponize and rule these men.’ In this circumstance, it felt like a way to protect herself.”“I wanted to honor this person, whether it was the character or the real person,” says Douglass. “Because there was no way to look at the real Elizabeth Holmes without feeling some sort of pain. It had the perfect amount of stretch but was not too polyester…This was [Holmes] saying, ‘How can I just fix [the hassle] of getting dressed everyday so I don’t have to think about it?’ And she obviously imitated someone who is her idol in doing it.”Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes in The DropoutEven when The Dropout’s Holmes settles on one red lipstick (Lancome L’Absolu Rouge Drama Ink Liquid Lipstick in French Bisou, for the record), the character still doesn’t have the time, energy, or desire to get her makeup right. During one, according to Douglass, the lights were on far too bright—forgiving the deliberately careless makeup job she had done on Seyfried. So Seyfried still looked more Hollywood actor than Silicon Valley scam artist.“But the funny thing was, as soon as Amanda just morphed her body and started using her voice, every single person’s jaw dropped on set,” says Douglass. “Because we were all looking at a different person. We wanted it to be awkward subtly.”Parkinson also notes that red, signifying blood and lust, was a color palette through line for Seyfried’s costuming in the Hulu series.“The show ends with just red on her lips, but she wore red when she met the family in high school for Christmas, red when she found the first Theranos building. That was our joke.”Douglass’s application of makeup changed from scene to scene—depending on where Holmes was in the story of Theranos’s rise and fall, and how frantic she was becoming behind the scenes of her fraudulent enterprise.“There were points where she was really at a breaking point of trying to sell her [company to investors] and was using her makeup as a weapon almost—using this very stereotypically sexy red lipstick, black-rimmed eyes kind of thing. She was selling that image to the people she was getting money from, but I feel like that also guarded her,” says Douglass. “To me it felt like there was some kind of psychological reason for her to put that on. That helped me get through it.”Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout.Costume designer Claire Parkinson, meanwhile, managed to track down both Holmes’s family photos and her high school’s yearbook to inform the character’s clothing on The Dropout. Given that Holmes was more science-minded than fashion-minded, Parkinson put the character a few years back on clothing trends—referencing J. Crew catalogs from 1998, for example, for scenes taking place in the early aughts.“I had a lot of conversations with [creator] Elizabeth Meriwether about how can we always make her feel a little bit off-trend…and kind of awkward,” says Parkinson, who scoured eBay, Poshmark, various Goodwills, and costume houses for Holmes-like looks. But there was still plenty of magic The Dropout’s hair, makeup, and costume team had to perform to convincingly transform the Oscar-nominated actor into Holmes, a Silicon Valley grind who had no time or want for aesthetic self-care during her 20-hour work days.“I studied all of the different shades of red that she wore, all her unmatched colors of foundation,” says makeup co-head Jorjee Douglass, describing the photos of the real-life Holmes that she pored over as research.

Hulu's "The Dropout" explores the origins of Elizabeth Holmes' supposedly fake voice. Here's why someone might want to change their own.

"The first week of 'New Girl' I lost my voice, and I had to go to a doctor, and the doctor said, 'Have you been drinking a lot of coffee and/or trying to sound authoritative?'" Meriwether recalls. "Because women have been marginalized in comparison with men in terms of power structures, there's an advantage to borrowing stuff that's associated with masculinity," Fought says, likening a woman deepening her voice to a power suit. As her business grows in the episode, titled "Green Juice," Holmes begins to understand her image's impact and starts to play with the pitch of her voice. "It lent to her mystique," Rhimes told the streaming platform. Dressed in a wrinkled gray and white plaid shirt, she's told by Apple alum Ana Arriola (Nicky Endres) she "should just dress more like a CEO." When the noise of an active construction site drowns out a meeting with her all-male board, a member directs her to "Speak up! Her pitch – like Paris Hilton's baby voice or the unique accent of convicted con woman Anna Sorokin (the focus of Netflix's "Inventing Anna") – becomes a defining characteristic.

In 'The Dropout,' Amanda Seyfried really became Elizabeth Holmes. See how the rest of the co-stars in the series fared.

Bochner is a character actor who's done a little bit of everything on TV and in film. Actress Kate Burton is a Shonda Rhimes favorite, having appeared in both Grey's Anatomy and Scandal; she's also been involved in the year of Scammer TV already as a part of the Inventing Anna cast. Here, she plays Ana Arriola, an employee who helped design the iPhone when working at Apple, and whom Holmes was excited to poach to work for Theranos. Rajskub is a comic actor at heart (she started on Mr. Show with Bob Odenkirk and David Cross and has shown up in shows like Always Sunny In Philadelphia) but has also flexed her acting skills before. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io The Dropout and Andrews don't miss this part of the character, but we also see the more tender character at the core—the one that a young Elizabeth Holmes could have been drawn to. Ambudkar is all over the place lately, starring in CBS' comedy Ghosts and also appearing in Free Guy, among other projects. It's a fictional character, but one representing the path of many early Theranos employees. But Andrews uses that Sayid from Lost charm to make sure the character is still human underneath it all. Seyfried is 36, but she convincingly plays Holmes at any age, ranging from as young as pre-College (just before attending Stanford, where she would eventually become the titular dropout) to staged footage from her own real-life deposition (which was heard in the podcast on which The Dropout is based) that took place in 2017. From Mean Girls to Mamma Mia to Jennifer's Body, Seyfried has always been a versatile actor, but managing to craft the duplicitous, habitual liar of Elizabeth Holmes into a character that we don't necessarily empathize with, but do get an understanding of, might be her greatest acting achievement yet. It's a portrayal that gives the character layers, but doesn't sugar coat any misdeeds either.

What does she do about the voice? That's the first question, right? Amanda Seyfried plays Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the new Hulu series The ...

Once she has investors who have given her their money, they naturally aren't eager to hear that the tech is no good, or to have the word spread that the tech is no good. There is a moment when a young employee realizes she's being asked to ignore problems in the testing of a Walgreens patient, and she simply can't believe it. There's a moment very early on in the series when a interviewer asks Holmes to describe herself in one word, and she hesitates, hesitates, hesitates, before finally saying: "Mission-oriented." That weird, unconvincing blurt of business-speak, as Seyfried serves it up, is very, very Elizabeth Holmes. She was deceiving people because she wanted, wanted, wanted — she especially wanted to do something huge that would make her the Steve Jobs of health care. Where The Dropout finds its groove is where it leans into the drama, and sometimes the darker comedy, of questions like how Holmes got "wellness centers" into a chain the size of Walgreens when her tech didn't work. At its best, The Dropout is about the thing that separates Theranos from a lot of these other startups, which is the fact that the Theranos technology, according to the legal proceedings against Holmes, never worked the way they said it did. And wouldn't investors want to see the tech work before they invested? This section of the tale wisely turns to one of the oft-asked questions about Theranos — why didn't anybody know something was wrong? Surely, they had the capacity to determine that she wasn't able to simply put a machine in front of them, prick a finger, and have it perform routine bloodwork. Seyfried gets it just right in the trailer around the :45 mark when she talks to a professor of hers (played by a wonderfully dry Laurie Metcalf) about what she wants to do. It's less important that she hit the low tone than it is that she capture the way Elizabeth Holmes speaks — charismatic in its way, yes, but also kind of ... dorky? Sure, the show, from Liz Meriwether (who made New Girl), looks at Holmes' early life and her relationship with her parents (Elizabeth Marvel has great fun as her mother) and brother.