Kate McKinnon to Play Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes for Hulu
Kate McKinnon‘s next small-screen role is no laughing matter. The Saturday Night Live standout will reportedly executive-produce and star in a limited series about disgraced entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes, according to our sister site Deadline.
Once billed as the next Steve Jobs, Holmes founded a privately held health technology company called Theranos in 2003 when she was just 19 years old. By 2013, the company — which claimed to have developed more accurate blood tests that required less blood than traditional exams — was worth about $10 billion, but a series of reports and scandals eventually exposed Theranos as a scam.
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McKinnon’s series is currently titled The Dropout, named after ABC News’ podcast about the Theranos scandal. Her fellow executive-producers include the three people responsible for the podcast: host and creator Rebecca Jarvis, who serves as ABC News’ chief business, technology and economics correspondent, as well as producers Taylor Dunn and Victoria Thompson.
ABC News describes the Dropout podcast as follows: “The story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos is an unbelievable tale of ambition and fame gone terribly wrong. How did the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire lose it all in the blink of an eye? How did the woman once heralded as ‘the next Steve Jobs’ find herself facing criminal charges — to which she pleaded not guilty — and up to 20 years in jail? How did her technology, meant to revolutionize healthcare, potentially put millions of patients at risk? And how did so many smart people get it so wrong along the way?”
Holmes’ story was also chronicled in the HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, which aired in January.
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