Why Amanda Seyfried initially turned down Hulu's offer to play Elizabeth Holmes, why New Girl creator Liz Meriwether was drawn to the Theranos story

The Hollywood Reporter

Seyfried was coming off of her Oscar-nominated performance as Marion Davies in Mank when she was contacted to replace Kate McKinnon on Hulu's The Dropout. Yet she promptly turned it down. “Listen, I was having a f*cking moment, OK?” she tells The Hollywood Reporter, laughing over Zoom. “I had COVID. I was isolating in the basement of a gross townhouse in Savannah, Georgia, because my husband was working on a movie there. And now an L.A. shoot? Pass!” One of the challenges, says Seyfried, was capturing Holmes' deep voice. “I knew my voice was never going to be as deep as hers because I’m physically not capable of it,” says Seyfried, before holding forth about vocal registers with a clinical specificity that goes over my head. “Besides, I promised I wasn’t going to give myself a hard time and try to completely mimic this other human being. It’d be impossible. And just not fun.” Meanwhile, The Dropout showrunner Meriwether says she was drawn to Holmes' story partly out of empathy. "I shared that experience of being in a position of power before I knew what I was doing and then getting in over my head,” says Meriwether, who was 29 when she created New Girl and served as its showrunner. “There’s something here that I hadn’t seen on TV before, a young woman enduring the pain and fear that comes with power — and not in an empowering girlboss way.”