After last month’s announcement that two-time Emmy winner Kate McKinnon (Saturday Night Live) had departed the project’s central role, Hulu’s limited series The Dropout has found its new star in Golden Globe and Oscar nominee Amanda Seyfried (Mank), according to The Hollywood Reporter.
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The series, which has been in development for over two years, is based on the ABC News podcast and centers on Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes as she raises hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the biotech company and quickly becomes one of the most celebrated entrepreneurs of the country and a media darling, though would eventually fall from grace upon the truth being exposed that the company’s blood-testing machine didn’t actually work. Labelled as a massive fraud, Holmes and her former Chief Operating Officer were subsequently indicted on nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud for distributing blood tests with falsified results to consumers.
The Dropout hails from New Girl creator and showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether, who is set to executive produce the project alongside Liz Heldens (The Passage), Liz Hannah, Katherine Pope, podcast host and creator Rebeccar Jarvis, Victoria Thompson and Taylor Dunn, with Seyfried also set to produce. Searchlight TV and 20th Television are producing the project for the streaming platform.
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After breaking out early in her career with supporting roles in the acclaimed teen comedy Mean Girls and UPN neo-noire teen drama Veronica Mars, Seyfried has made a name for herself in a variety of genres, from the hit musical Mamma Mia! to sci-fi actioner In Time, romantic drama Dear John, Seth MacFarlane comedies A Million Ways to Die in the West and Ted 2. Most recently she starred as Marion Davies in David Fincher’s Citizen Kane biographical drama Mank, for which she received critical acclaim and was nominated for both the Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, losing the former to The Mauritanian‘s Jodie Foster while the latter ceremony has yet to take place.
(Photo Credit: Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images)
