The fall of Theranos was almost as spectacular as the tech startup’s rise, but “The Dropout” is more concerned with how founder Elizabeth Holmes got there in the first place.
The Hulu limited series, which premiered Thursday and is based on the ABC News/ABC Radio podcast of the same name, traces Holmes from an ambitious science nerd to the next Steve Jobs to convicted fraudster.
“I felt a responsibility to dig into a really complicated story about women in tech and science,” showrunner Liz Meriwether, best known for creating “New Girl,” told the Daily News.
“People know about her and they know about her voice or the turtleneck, but they don’t know the details, they don’t know how long it went on or the people involved, how many people got taken in by it.”
Everyone can picture Holmes: the blond hair pulled back into a bun, the black turtleneck on the cover of Forbes, holding the nanosized tube of blood that she claimed could revolutionize blood testing. As word of Theranos’ magic grew, her friends and investors became more famous: Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Jim Mattis, Betsy DeVos, Rupert Murdoch.
The bottom dropped out when it became clear that Holmes’ tall tales of changing the world were just that, tall tales. In March 2018, after an explosive takedown by the Wall Street Journal, the SEC charged Holmes and former Theranos president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani with raising more than $700 million between 2013 to 2015 by deceiving investors about the success of their portable blood analyzer.
“The Dropout” gets there eventually. First, Holmes, played by Amanda Seyfried, has to meet Sunny. She has to drop out of Stanford. She has to invent the device, convince Larry Ellison and Walgreens to invest. She has to tell the world that she is the best.
“People are credulous. They want to believe. There’s this desperate desire to believe in something,” Naveen Andrews, who plays Sunny, told The News.
“Religion, politics. People want to be led. They want to follow. They want to believe.”
From the outside, Elizabeth and Sunny’s relationship was strictly business, a company founder and president. Secretly, they began dating as early as 2004 after meeting several years earlier on a trip to Beijing when he was 37 and she was 18. During her trial, Holmes described an abusive relationship, sometimes physically violent, often verbally.
Andrews paints it as a true love story gone wrong.
“He was so besotted with her, so desperately in love,” he told The News.
“The Dropout” does not depict Holmes as a criminal mastermind, rather a smart woman who thought she was smarter than she was. She was desperate to prove her parents wrong, her professors, even herself. It’s a story of science and business, Meriwether said, but also of the media, of sexism and what you tell and what you hide.
In Holmes’ onscreen telling, she hid her relationship with Sunny not because she was embarrassed, but because she wanted to be taken seriously. For a while, he was the only one she could be honest with. He helped craft her iconic image, laying out the turtlenecks and slacks. In his walk-in closet, she practiced her voice, dropping it down an octave to pretend she wasn’t a young girl, barely in her 20s, trying to stand alone.
“At the outset, they had good intentions,” Andrews told The News.
“This is what makes it so painful to watch what some people might describe as the degradation of their souls, of their inner selves, because you cross a certain kind of Rubicon and then you’re in uncharted territory where it’s a little bit more serious than ‘fake it ‘till you make it.’”
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