The Dropout

THE DROPOUT has made its big debut, exploring the rise and fall of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.

ABC News journalist Rebecca Jarvis documented the case in a podcast called The Dropout, which released its first season in early 2019. The new series is adapted from the podcast, with Jarvis serving as an executive producer alongside the podcast's ...

Amanda Seyfried stars as Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout. Read the Empire review now.

Holmes’ pursuit of power is depicted as trance-like, with Seyfried’s eyes always straying off to the greater goal as her character’s empire crumbles around her. Unlike a recent trend in TV storytelling that sees two, if not three, timelines approached in each episode, the series writers here thankfully stick largely to the past, only occasionally skipping forward to show Holmes on trial. Amanda Seyfried is unshakeable as the Ivy League dropout, whose youthful ambition manifests into a relentless need to revolutionise healthcare technology.

"Inventing Anna" and "The Dropout" lead a packed slate of new documentaries and fictionalized series about grifters.

The pair ended up dodging angry investors, employees and authorities while on the run for months, in a misadventure that ended with police locating them thanks to a non-vegan Domino’s pizza order. “But ‘Super Pumped’ is most compelling as a study of how one individual at the top can create a noxious office culture — one so rancid it eventually looks like corporate suicide.” This upcoming Apple TV Plus series based on the Wondery podcast of the same name stars Anne Hathaway and a heavily made-up Jared Leto as Rebekah and Adam Neumann, the power (hungry) couple behind WeWork. The once highly valued co-working space start-up saw plummeting profits in 2019 amid scandal over the company’s unconventional corporate culture and massive debts. Both McKinnon and Mitchell give dutiful performances as the eccentric personalities, but the consensus among critics is that “Joe vs. The real-life Holmes, meanwhile, awaits sentencing after her conviction on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud against investors. “The Dropout” has garnered generally positive reviews, with particular praise for Seyfried — who goes all-in on replicating Holmes’s weirdness (one scene finds her dancing toward a Steve Jobs poster in a display that borders on liturgical) — and Naveen Andrews, who plays her ex-boyfriend and alleged co-conspirator Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani. The show, which dropped Thursday, also features William H. Macy and Laurie Metcalf as part of its ensemble cast.

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?

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.