‘The Dropout’: Amanda Seyfried is ‘A Little Worried’ About Her Elizabeth Holmes Voice
In March, Hulu‘s The Dropout premieres with Amanda Seyfried portraying Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and her deep voice. However, the role is similar to Julia Garner’s Inventing Anna accent. Both women had to perfect their voices to sound completely different. Holmes has a deep baritone voice, which Seyfried explained was very difficult to replicate for the eight-episode drama.
Amanda Seyfried on her Elizabeth Holmes’ voice in ‘The Dropout’
Amanda Seyfried becomes a 19-year-old Stanford University dropout and Theranos founder, Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout cast. However, it’s no easy feat. The teen wanted to change the world with her biotech company in Silicon Valley. She created a vision where patients could get the results of over 200 diagnostic tests with only a tiny drop of blood from a finger prick. However, no one took her seriously, so Elizabeth Holmes changed her voice to a deep baritone. Throughout The Dropout, viewers watch the transformation of Holmes through Seyfried’s acting. However, the 36-year-old actor revealed that the most challenging part of becoming Holmes was that deep voice.
“In terms of the depth of the voice, I had to work really hard to get there because I speak at such a higher level than Holmes,” Seyfried told What to watch. “It’s incredible to have the voice come in slowly and evolve over time in the story because that’s what happened in real life. I mean, when the public met Elizabeth Holmes, she was already speaking very deeply. But now we get to see her as a kid where she has a pretty average tenor. And then you see the voice develop because that’s the whole point of the show — you want to see where she came from, where she went and how she got there.”
Seyfried practiced and tried to get her voice as close as possible to Elizabeth Holmes’ level. However, she still has some anxiety over what fans might say when they hear it.
“I am a little worried about what viewers are going to say about the voice,” she added. ‘But at the end of the day, I’m an actor — I’m not her — and I did my best to try to capture the oddness of it.”
Seyfried finds Holmes fascinating
In an interview with Jimmy Kimmel, Amanda Seyfried opened up about what it was like to become Elizabeth Holmes for The Dropout.
“I came from a compassionate angle, but also I was just fascinated with her,” she told Kimmel.
During the Jimmy Kimmel Live segment, they discuss how Holmes “doubled-down” her vision, although her blood-testing device never worked accurately.
“The perfect analogy I heard was that she had jumped off a cliff and was trying to build her parachute before she got to the ground,” Seyfried added.
Did Elizabeth Holmes change her voice like in ‘The Dropout’?
In Hulu’s The Dropout, viewers watch how Holmes practiced changing her voice in front of a mirror in the privacy of her home. However, the biotech founder’s family denied claims to TMZ that Holmes ever changed her voice. Former employees at Theranos explained on the ABC podcast, The Dropout, that the entrepreneur “fell out of character” sometimes after drinking.
When Jimmy Kimmel asked Seyfried how she knew that Holmes was practicing the voice at home, she had an interesting response.
“I truly believe that no one will ever know,” Seyfried told Kimmel. “No one will ever be in her mind, but we tried to get really close.”
Hulu’s The Dropout premieres on March 2, 2022, with three episodes and then every Thursday until April 7.
