Hollywood has a history of making dueling projects about the same thing. In the late ‘90s, animated bug movies were (apparently!) all the rage, so we got both Antz and A Bug’s Life. Around the same time there was Deep Impact (about an asteroid heading towards Earth) and, two months later, Armageddon (ditto). We almost got two movies about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, one a miniseries, the other a movie. But the former got done first, and it was so good that the star of the latter has decided there doesn’t need to be another.
That said, she did show up for drinks wearing a black turtleneck: “I tried on a hundred outfits for this and ended up just looking like Steve Jobs. Or Amanda Seyfried.”
— Kyle Buchanan (@kylebuchanan) November 2, 2022
The New York Times reporter Kyle Buchanan had a chat with Jennifer Lawrence, who was all set to reteam with her Don’t Look Up director Adam McKay for an adaptation of the book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley. Earlier this year, Lawrence was all gung ho about playing the black turtleneck-loving, low-speaking Holmes. But now, having seen Amanda Seyfried nail it in her Emmy-winning turn in Hulu’s The Dropout, Lawrence is basically, like, what’s the point.
“I thought she was terrific,” Lawrence confessed. “I was like, ‘Yeah, we don’t need to redo that.’ She did it.”
So now she’s out. It’s not as though she didn’t put in the effort. “I tried on a hundred outfits for this and ended up just looking like Steve Jobs. Or Amanda Seyfried,” Lawrence cracked.
It’s not yet known if McKay feels the same way and will abandon ship, or if he’ll simply find someone else who could top or at least equal Seyfried.
Earlier this year, Holmes was found guilty of four of the 11 charges of fraud and conspiracy for claims she made to investors of Theranos, her much-hyped — and much-failed — blood-testing company. Among the claims she had made was that she had developed cutting-edge technology that could run hundreds of tests with just a few drops of blood. Spoiler: That wasn’t true. One of her victims, incidentally, was Trump-era Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who got swindled out of millions.
(Via NYT‘s Kyle Buchanan)