Amanda Seyfried Transforms Into Disgraced Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes In Hulu's 'The Dropout'

Amanda Seyfried has taken on the role of disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the new Hulu limited series The Dropout. The 36-year-old actress is playing the 38-year-old disgraced biotechnology entrepreneur who was convicted of fraud after duping investors out of millions. She falsely claimed that her company's technology could run hundreds of medical tests using a few drops of blood. "What if you could test your blood in your own home? And what if it wasn't a whole vial, but just a drop?" Elizabeth, then a Stanford University dropout, asks in the trailer. "This machine is going to change the world."

For the role, the Oscar-nominated actress had to artificially make her voice lower, according to Newsweek. "We collectively judged her for bringing her voice down as if she's lying to us. But you're not being untruthful because you're deepening your voice. She needed it. It wasn't just the fact that she was a charismatic genius and ambitious. It was that she had to present herself in a specific way," said Seyfried. "I didn't have anything of her real life, but I had 10 hours of depositions. I had the interviews and then I had the one when things had come crashing down. All of a sudden I became this eager college student. She was very passionate and very ambitious. She truly believed she was gonna get there. She was going too fast," Seyfried shared.

Speaking of how differently they sound, she added, "Her accent, roundedness; her mouth is shaped differently. She speaks from a different place in her mouth, and maybe that's an accent or a regional accent, or maybe that's an effect, whatever it is, there's no judgment, I'm going to try to mimic it. And then when it comes to the depth, because there were two parts to her voice, we're just going to go try different levels. I worked with my singing coach because I have a pretty high voice; it's just an average female voice—I'm a little bit up and she's much further down."

According to PEOPLE, The Dropout also stars Stephen Fry, William H. Macy, Laurie Metcalf, Sam Waterston, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Kate Burton, Michel Gill, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Elizabeth Marvel, Dylan Minnette, Alan Ruck, and Michaela Watkins. The limited series is executive produced by New Girl creator and showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether, as well as Liz Heldens, Liz Hannah, Katherine Pope, Rebecca Jarvis, Victoria Thompson, and Taylor Dunn.