Elizabeth Holmes said Amanda Seyfried doesn’t actually play her in The Dropout, but rather a “character” she created.
The disgraced CEO of Theranos, who was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison, became known for her looks and voice, which consisted of red lipstick, a black turtleneck, and a distinctive way of speaking – deep and hollow.
During a new interview with The New York Times, published online Sunday, Holmes revealed what the paper called her “new personality,” Liz Holmes, who is described as speaking in a soft, “unobtrusive voice” and blending into others inserts mothers.
Speaking to the Times about actresses impersonating her in projects such as Seyfried in the Hulu miniseries The Dropout or Jennifer Lawrence, who was set to play the CEO in Adam McKay’s Bad Blood before leaving the film, Holmes said, “You don’t play with me You play a character I created.”
Seyfried also won an Emmy Award for her role in the limited series.
Holmes, who founded Theranos at the age of 19, explained that she created the Distinguished Persona because “I believed that I could be that good at business and be taken seriously and not be taken as a little girl or a girl with no good technical ideas would . … Maybe people realized that’s not authentic because it wasn’t.”
In 2022, a federal judge sentenced Holmes to more than 11 years in prison for duping investors in the failed startup that promised to revolutionize blood testing but the technology never really worked.
Throughout the company’s 15-year history, Holmes has been at the center of a program designed to tout Theranos’ blood-testing system as a healthcare breakthrough — a medical device that the company claimed could detect a variety of diseases and conditions with just a few drops Blood. The technology helped Theranos raise nearly $1 billion from investors, and Holmes became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at the time with a fortune of $4.5 billion based on her 50 percent stake in Theranos.
But after the Wall Street Journal published an investigation into Theranos in 2015, questioning whether the technology really worked, everything fell apart, eventually leading to Holmes’ conviction.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.