Jennifer Lawrence is out of Adam McKay’s Elizabeth Holmes movie Bad Blood – and Amanda Seyfried is the reason why. In December 2021, it was reported that Apple was backing a feature film about disgraced The Dropout, starring Seyfried as the notorious entrepreneur/scammer.
Scammers in general have of course become a hot subject for content creators in recent years, thanks to fiction titles like Inventing Anna and The Tinder Swindler and documentaries like Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. But Hulu’s The Dropout may be the apex of the form so far, with its depiction of Holmes’ rise-and-fall as the head of Theranos, and Seyfried’s pitch-perfect Emmy-winning performance as Holmes herself. Given how successful The Dropout was in telling a version of the Holmes story, all filmmakers who choose to tackle the subject from now on will have a tough act to follow.
And reported Bad Blood star Lawrence for her part indeed seems sensitive to how high a bar Seyfried and The Dropout set when it comes to telling the Holmes story. That’s why Lawrence now says she’s out of Bad Blood. Per Kyle Buchanan of the New York Times, Lawrence said of Seyfried, “I thought she was terrific. I was like, 'Yeah, we don't need to redo that.' She did it." No update was offered on whether Bad Blood will go on with a different lead actor.
Jennifer Lawrence Would've Been A Perfect Elizabeth Holmes (But She's Right About Amanda Seyfried)
Lawrence of course has received acclaim for playing real-life figures in the past, garnering an Oscar nomination for her performance as self-made businesswoman Joy Mangano in David O. Russell’s Joy. Thinking about Lawrence’s performance as the gritty and tough Mangano in that film indeed gives an indication of the qualities she would have brought to Bad Blood. Qualities that would have made her arguably ideally suited to playing the tenacious but ultimately flawed Holmes.
But though Lawrence certainly could play Holmes convincingly, she is correct in her assessment that there is no point in trying to follow in the footsteps of The Dropout and Seyfried’s performance. Thanks to the Hulu show and its star, a thorough examination of Holmes as a character has already been delivered. McKay of course will surely bring a more satiric bent to his own depiction of Holmes in Bad Blood, but even with the added satiric element, there is bound to be a certain feeling of redundancy to any depiction of Holmes post-Dropout. Clearly, Lawrence had no interest in having her own Holmes performance held up to scrutiny against the example set by Seyfried, an actor whose work she clearly ires. It remains to be seen if Bad Blood has a future without Lawrence, but it seems Lawrence might advise McKay to drop the project altogether, and perhaps he should.
Source: Kyle Buchanan/Twitter
