Elizabeth Holmes has been called a lot of things. Just a few years ago, the founder and chief executive officer of the now-defunct blood-testing startup Theranos was hailed with superlatives — genius, feminist icon and girlboss among them.
She was recast as a villain, a charlatan and a con artist after exposés in The Wall Street Journal revealed the Theranos device she claimed could perform a variety of blood tests with just a single drop of blood didn't work as promised.
Today, the former high-flying CEO is a convicted felon. Holmes stood trial in federal court in San Jose, California, last year on fraud charges in what The New York Times declared "Silicon Valley's trial of the decade," and in January she was found guilty on four counts of defrauding investors.
But the verdict was hardly a resounding indictment — the jury could not reach a decision on three additional counts of deceiving investors, and Holmes was found not guilty of four counts related to defrauding patients.
In The Dropout, a limited series that was in production during the trial and wrapped before it came to a conclusion, Elizabeth Meriwether — showrunner, executive producer and writer — shuns simplistic characterizations, instead depicting Holmes as a complicated human being.
"I'm definitely not taking her side in any way," Meriwether says of her approach to the Hulu series, which drops March 3. "I just feel like the full story hasn't been told yet. And by full story, I mean thinking of her character as a complete human being. So going into this, it was important to me to ask: how do we tell this story from her point of view, and how do we add to what was already out there? Which is a lot."
To wit: Holmes's fall from grace has been examined in the book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, written by investigative journalist John Carreyrou, who broke the Theranos story in The Wall Street Journal. The HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, directed by Alex Gibney, also addressed the topic, as did countless news reports and articles.
Meriwether, who made her name in television as the creator of the Fox sitcom New Girl, based her interpretation of the entrepreneur's story on The Dropout, an ABC News podcast hosted by journalist Rebecca Jarvis, also an executive producer of the Hulu series. "To me, the podcast is the version of the story that gets as close as possible to the mystery of what's going on in Elizabeth Holmes's head," Meriwether says.
That title was inspired by the fact that, like so many entrepreneurs who head to Silicon Valley to strike it rich, Holmes did not complete college. At nineteen, she dropped out of Stanford University, where she had been studying chemical engineering and first came up with the idea for a new blood-testing device. She then devoted herself to developing Theranos into a business.
By the time she was thirty, Holmes was the toast of Silicon Valley, celebrated in Forbes as the world's youngest self-made billionaire. Then it all came crumbling down.
Meriwether remembers first learning about the Theranos scandal in a Vanity Fair article and relating to the woman at the center of the firestorm. "I'm also named Elizabeth. I'm also blonde. I'm almost exactly her age. There was something about the story that just really got to me," she says.
She had something else in common with Holmes — she'd also navigated success at a young age. "New Girl premiered when I was twenty-nine," Meriwether recalls, "and I didn't know what I was doing. I was overwhelmed and being asked to be a leader. I think I connected with the situation that she was in, being totally in over her head. But then, obviously, the choices that she made were very different from the choices that I made."
Amanda Seyfried, who last year was Oscar-nominated for her portrayal of starlet Marion Davies in the Netflix film Mank, portrays Holmes in The Dropout. The actress says she said yes to the role — and also to a role as producer — in large part because of Meriwether's decision not to simply dismiss Holmes as a bad person.
After reading the first two scripts of the series and looking over some outlines, "I felt like it was a well-rounded perspective," Seyfried says. "There are many reasons why we watch TV and movies and read books, but I think one of the main reasons is that we want to be able to relate to people. And what do you do when you take someone who is infamous? You humanize them, because they are human at the end of the day."
The early episodes of The Dropout reveal some of the pivotal events in Holmes's life. When she was seventeen, her father lost his job as an executive at Enron, putting the family's finances in a precarious position. At eighteen, at a Mandarin immersion course in China, she met Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani; then a thirty-seven-year-old dotcom millionaire, he would become her boyfriend and the chief operating officer at Theranos. And she was raped at college.
These experiences and others shaped her psyche, Seyfried says. "Once you see how things unfolded throughout adolescence and into her being a young adult, it's so much easier to understand why somebody got to the point that Elizabeth Holmes did. You've got to start from a nonjudgmental place if you really want to explore somebody."
In addition to delving into her personality and motivations, Seyfried acquired Holmes's way of speaking. "I did a lot of reading aloud [in her voice] a month or two before I started shooting. I was just reading aloud every time I drove because anytime you drive upstate, it's at least twenty minutes," says Seyfried, who lives on a farm in the Catskills region of New York State. "So I was in the car a lot alone, redoing her TED talk because I basically had it memorized. I would talk as her, getting used to her cadence and her rhythms.
"I also had nine or ten hours of her deposition and watched it on repeat when I'd be doing things like painting, knitting, whatever, while my kids were napping or my daughter was at school," she adds. "You just get it in your body."
She worked with a voice coach to create her own take on Holmes's famously deep voice, which the entrepreneur faked to sound more authoritative, according to some former Theranos employees (Holmes's family members insist she always had a lower voice). "The most important thing wasn't the depth of voice, because it evolves over time," Seyfried says. "The most important thing was to make it feel natural to me."
She wasn't out to transform herself into a carbon copy of Holmes. "I'm not embodying her. I'm embodying my version of her because I can't become her. That's impossible," Seyfried says, adding, "There have been actors in my generation that have, from my point of view, turned into [other] people. That wouldn't have been healthy for me to try to attain. So it was always going to be my version of Elizabeth Holmes because I'm sure there's a bajillion great versions of her."
"She's completely blown me away in this part," Meriwether says of her star. "What is really amazing to me is just how much [she makes] you care about the character, but you also feel like she's capable of doing bad things."
Michael Showalter, an executive producer who also directed the first four episodes, worked with an all-star cast featuring Naveen Andrews (Sense8) opposite Seyfried as Balwani. Emmy winner Laurie Metcalf (Roseanne) portrays Dr. Phyllis Gardner, a Stanford professor of medicine who doubted Holmes's claims about Theranos from the beginning. Fellow Emmy winner William H. Macy (Shameless) plays Richard Fuisz, a friend of the Holmes family and an inventor of biomedical devices who tangled with Theranos in court over a patent dispute. Utkarsh Ambudkar (Ghosts, Never Have I Ever) portrays Rakesh Madhava, who was one of Theranos's first employees.
The series was filmed at various locations around Los Angeles. A San Fernando Valley warehouse served as home base and a stage, while a portion of an office park near LAX was dressed as the interior and exterior of Theranos headquarters.
In establishing the look and feel of The Dropout, Showalter aimed to ground the series "so that you could feel on some level like you were there [at the inception of Theranos], that this was a pulling back of the curtain to be in those rooms, behind the scenes, as these events were taking place — that you could kind of experience it with her.
"In the first few episodes, the camera is always moving with Elizabeth," he points out, describing Holmes as a runaway train. "She's always going somewhere, so we tried to create a feeling of momentum."
One of the most intense scenes Showalter directed finds Balwani rushing to the Theranos office to comfort a terrified Holmes after a scary incident. There were complex emotions for the actors to play, Showalter says, because until that moment Holmes had been pushing Balwani away, knowing he was in love with her. But she called him in her time of need.
Seyfried and Andrews rose to the occasion, the director says, quickly cementing an onscreen bond. "That was literally our first day of shooting, which is always hard. On day one, no matter how much preparation you've done, there's always this feeling of, 'What are we doing?' Everybody from the actors to the crew, we haven't quite broken in our muscles yet," he reflects.
"That was kind of a big thing to shoot right at the beginning — to have to portray that connection where he was the person to comfort her," Andrews acknowledges. "We went for it, and I think it was the right decision in retrospect."
"It was a true icebreaker, having our faces smooshed up against each other," Seyfried says. "I didn't know Naveen very well, but we had done some rehearsals together, and we had a really good rapport. He loved the role, and he loves acting, and he's incredibly good at it and very well prepared, which is exactly what I need and always want."
Before founding a software development company that made him a millionaire, Balwani worked at Microsoft. As Andrews studied the dotcom exec, he saw a "desperation that seems to be at the heart of him, which is essentially romantic because it has to do with loving somebody to such a degree that you will go to the end of the Earth for that person. What will you do for love? How far will you take it? It's almost like a knife edge — being on that precipice almost all the time. That's hard to live with."
The actor, who gained twenty-five pounds for the role, observed — and portrayed — the physical signs of stress that he saw in Balwani, particularly in his face. After the shoot ended, he says, "It took a long time to stop holding my face a certain way. He has a certain tension, at least the way I saw it, that's always there. It took a while to relax physically and get away from that."
Meriwether praises Andrews for fearlessly taking on the character, noting, "Sunny's a really difficult part — for all that we know about Elizabeth, we really don't know anything about Sunny."
In fact, little was known about Holmes and Balwani's twelve-year romantic relationship when Meriwether initially wrote the series. "So I felt like it was my job as a writer to imagine what that relationship was," she says.
Meriwether gathered more details during the Holmes trial, which brought to light text messages Holmes and Balwani had exchanged over several years. (At press time, Balwani, facing the same charges as Holmes, was scheduled to go on trial in March.)
"In real time I was trying to process all of the new information that was coming out and incorporate it into the script," she says. "I was scouring spreadsheets, hundreds and hundreds of pages of spreadsheets of text messages, while we were shooting. It was a crazy situation."
In hindsight, it is remarkable that a college dropout without a serious résumé was able to convince celebrated venture capitalist Don Lucas, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, General James Mattis (who was on the Theranos board) and a host of other investors as well as members of the press to believe in her and her company.
What was it about Holmes that drew people in? "That's what we're trying to explore in the show," Meriwether says. "She was young and she had a vision, and she had this deep voice and this confidence and intelligence and beauty. I think she really took people by surprise.
"What she was trying to do was a good idea," Meriwether adds. "She just didn't have anything to back it up."
In addition to Meriwether, Showalter and Jarvis, the executive producers of The Dropout include Liz Heldens, Liz Hannah, Katherine Pope, Victoria Thompson, Taylor Dunn and Jordana Mollick. The series is a production of Searchlight Television and 20th Television.
This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #1, 2022, under the title, "Nobody's Fool."
