news Elizabeth Holmes on the Theranos Movie Jennifer Lawrence Exited: That’s a ‘Character,’ Not Me

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is separating herself from the fictionalized portrayals of her personal, professional, and criminal life.

Convicted fraudster Holmes gave a controversial interview with The New York Times seemingly as part of a personal rebrand as a new mother of two.

“I made so many mistakes and there was so much I didn’t know and understand, and I feel like when you do it wrong, it’s like you really internalize it in a deep way,” Holmes said of founding Silicon Valley blood-testing company Theranos and infamously channeling Steve Jobs with a deep voice and black turtleneck uniform. “I believed it would be how I would be good at business and taken seriously and not taken as a little girl or a girl who didn’t have good technical ideas. Maybe people picked up on that not being authentic, since it wasn’t.”

Holmes addressed Emmy-winning limited series “The Dropout” starring Amanda Seyfried and the Adam McKay film “Bad Blood,” which Jennifer Lawrence dropped out of in November 2022.

“They’re not playing me,” Holmes said when asked about the Lawrence movie. “They’re playing a character I created.”

She continued, “If we let how other people might view that, or what impression someone might make of it dictate how we live our lives, then we’ve lost. Finding your person in the middle of all of this and experiencing that love when you’re going through hell is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced.”

Holmes pointed to former business partner and ex-boyfriend Sunny Balwani for advising her to take on a different persona.

“He always told me I needed to ‘kill Elizabeth,’ so I could become a good entrepreneur,” Holmes said. “It was only when people started to raise questions about the company that I started to see that he was not who I thought he was in business. And then that made me start to question everything else.”

She added, “Even though that period was a crisis and Theranos was my life and like my child, I gave everything I had to it,” noting that she “became free” after the company went under.

The Holmes interview in the Times was roundly accused on social media over the weekend as being a puff piece.

McKay’s “Bad Blood” film was confirmed in January 2021 by would-be lead star Lawrence, who was set to transform into Holmes for the adaptation of true crime book of the same name by Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou, charting the rise and fall of shady Silicon Valley medical start-up Theranos.

New York Times journalist Kyle Buchanan tweeted after the publication of an interview with “Causeway” star Lawrence that she would no longer play Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in Adam McKay’s “Bad Blood” film.

“She came to that conclusion after watching Amanda Seyfried play Holmes in ‘The Dropout,'” Buchanan wrote, adding Lawrence said, “I thought she was terrific. I was like, ‘Yeah, we don’t need to redo that.’ She did it.”
 
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