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“Ghostbusters” and “Saturday Night Live” star Kate McKinnon will play disgraced wunderkind entreprenuer Elizabeth Holmes in the new small screen series “The Dropout” for Hulu.
The limited drama series, based on ABC News/ABC Radio’s podcast about the rise of fall of Holmes and her company, Theranos, will be executive produced by McKinnon and “The Dropout” podcast host /creator Rebecca Jarvis, who is ABC News chief business, technology and economics correspondent. The podcast’s producers Taylor Dunn and Victoria Thompson serve as producers on the series.
According to the podcast’s description, “the story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos is an unbelievable tale of ambition and fame gone terribly wrong. How did the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire lose it all in the blink of an eye? How did the woman once heralded as ‘the next Steve Jobs’ find herself facing criminal charges — to which she pleaded not guilty — and up to 20 years in jail? How did her technology, meant to revolutionize healthcare, potentially put millions of patients at risk? And how did so many smart people get it so wrong along the way?”
Holmes was the founder and former CEO of Theranos, a now defunct company known for its unlikely claims to have revolutionized blood testing using surprisingly small volumes of blood such as from a fingerprick. In 2015, Forbes named Holmes the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in America on the basis of a $9 billion valuation of Theranos. By the next year, following revelations of potential fraud, Forbes revised her net worth to zero dollars, and Fortune named Holmes one of the “World’s Most Disappointing Leaders”.
The early credibility of Theranos was in part interpreted as an effect of Holmes’s personal connections and ability to recruit the support of influential people including Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, George Shultz, James Mattis, and Betsy DeVos.
The project hails from Fox Searchlight Pictures – now housed under the Disney umbrella – who snagged the rights to the story in 2018.
Via ‘Deadline‘
