Scroll To Top
television

Kate McKinnon to Play Disgraced Tech Guru Elizabeth Holmes

Kate McKinnon and Mila Kunis

The Emmy-award winning Saturday Night Live star will also executive produce the Hulu series. 

Disgraced healthcare guru Elizabeth Holmes has already been the subject of the HBO documentary The Inventor. Now, Kate McKinnon will executive produce and star as Holmes in the Hulu limited series The Dropout, about the billionaire who founded the company Theranos and defrauded the healthcare industry with a method that was supposed to revolutionize blood testing, Deadline reports.

McKinnon, an Emmy-award winner for Saturday Night Live, where she's renowned for her inspired impersonations of Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, Kellyanne Conway, and even Jeff Sessions and Rudy Giuliani, is not new to Holmes's story as she's already an executive producer on the Dropout podcast, which premiered in January.

The six-10 episode series is a collaboration among Disney properties, including newly acquired Fox Searchlight, Hulu (20th Century Fox has a 30 percent stake), and ABC News.

Holmes, a chemical engineering student who dropped out of Stanford at 19, eventually launched Theranos and became the youngest self-made female billionaire. She was widely hailed as "the next Steve Jobs."

By 2014, Holmes was the toast of Silicon Valley, but within two years, the company's problems were exposed. In 2015, the FDA began investigating Theranos, and found "major inaccuracies" in Theranos's testing on patients. That same year, the Wall Street Journal published a story exposing Holmes and Theranos. Holmes was charged with "massive fraud." It took several years, but in 2018, the Department of Justice charged her with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Best known for her starring on SNL, McKinnon's movie roles include The Spy Who Dumped Me and Ghostbusters.

Advocate Channel - The Pride StoreOut / Advocate Magazine - Fellow Travelers & Jamie Lee Curtis

From our Sponsors

Most Popular

Latest Stories

Tracy E. Gilchrist

Tracy E. Gilchrist is the VP, Executive Producer of Entertainment for the Advocate Channel. A media veteran, she writes about the intersections of LGBTQ+ equality and pop culture. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief of The Advocate and the first feminism editor for the 55-year-old brand. In 2017, she launched the company's first podcast, The Advocates. She is an experienced broadcast interviewer, panel moderator, and public speaker who has delivered her talk, "Pandora's Box to Pose: Game-changing Visibility in Film and TV," at universities throughout the country.
Tracy E. Gilchrist is the VP, Executive Producer of Entertainment for the Advocate Channel. A media veteran, she writes about the intersections of LGBTQ+ equality and pop culture. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief of The Advocate and the first feminism editor for the 55-year-old brand. In 2017, she launched the company's first podcast, The Advocates. She is an experienced broadcast interviewer, panel moderator, and public speaker who has delivered her talk, "Pandora's Box to Pose: Game-changing Visibility in Film and TV," at universities throughout the country.