Kate McKinnon Will Play Elizabeth Holmes In Hulu Series 'The Dropout'

Kate McKinnon will deepen her voice to play disgraced entrepreneur and accused con-artist Elizabeth Holmes in the Hulu series The Dropout. Based on the podcast of the same name, the series will track Holmes' meteoric rise and shocking fall as she created privately held health tech corporation Theranos, and then proceeded to lie about nearly everything.

By now you've likely heard the story of Elizabeth Holmes. When she was 19-year-old, the college dropout founded Theranos. The company raised $700 million from venture capitalists and private investors, and was eventually valued at a whopping $10 billion. Holmes wanted to do for health tech what Steve Jobs had done for personal computers, phones, and more. To become the next Steve Jobs, Holmes and her company developed the Edison, a device that Holmes claimed could run a large variety of tests from a simple finger prick's worth of blood. If true, this would've been a major breakthrough, and could've possibly changed the face of healthcare as we know. But it wasn't true. Holmes and her company fabricated results and constantly cut corners, potentially putting lives in danger. Eventually, people started to catch on, and Holmes and Theranos were ruined.

Holmes' story has been covered in the book Bad Blood, and the recent HBO documentary The Inventor. The story was also the focus of the podcast The Dropout, and that podcast will now serve as the basis for a Hulu series of the same name. Deadline reports Saturday Night Live star Kate McKinnon will play Holmes in the series, which is expected to run between 6 to 10 episodes. Here's the official synopsis of the original podcast:

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?

This isn't the only dramatized version of the Holmes story in the works. Adam McKay is attached to direct an adaptation of Bad Blood starring Jennifer Lawrence, but there hasn't been much movement on that film lately. Personally, I'm much more interested in this Hulu adaptation, simply because I think McKinnon is a wonderful performer, and I'm incredibly curious to see what she does with the role of Elizabeth Holmes.