Yahoo Sports Amanda Seyfried weighs in on Elizabeth Holmes' prison sentence: 'It's fair for her'
Amanda Seyfried, who won an Emmy for her portrayal of disgraced Silicon Valley entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout, said in a new interview that the Theranos founder's punishment is appropriate for her crimes.
Seyfried was asked about Holmes during a Good Morning America appearance Tuesday, the same day Holmes reported to a Texas prison facility to begin serving an 11-year sentence for defrauding investors.
The actress first expressed sympathy for Holmes' two young children. "I feel for those kids," Seyfried said. "There's two kids that are hanging in the balance here. As a parent, I'm just like… As a mom, I don't know."
She trailed off, then added, "Life's not fair, but in a lot of ways it's fair. It's fair for her, in particular."
Beth Dubber/Hulu Amanda Seyfried in 'The Dropout'
Holmes, 39, was famously tried for falsely claiming that her company's blood test could rapidly scan for and detect a variety of conditions using only a few drops of blood. She was convicted in January 2022 on four counts of defrauding investors and later sentenced to 135 months in prison, which the Associated Press reports she will serve at FPC Bryan, a minimum-security women's prison camp 95 miles northwest of Houston, where Holmes grew up. Holmes was also ordered to pay $452 million in restitution and given three years of supervised release after her prison term.
As she begins her sentence, Holmes is leaving behind her husband, William "Billy" Evans, and their two children: a son born in July 2021, a few weeks before the start of her trial, and a 3-month old daughter born after Holmes was sentenced. Holmes has appealed her case and previously requested to remain out of prison while those appeals are tried. Those requests have been denied.
Seyfried previously spoke to EW about empathizing with Holmes while portraying her in The Dropout. "Playing somebody, you have to want to know where they came from and what they might have been thinking," she said. "You have to put away your judgments and your feelings and start fresh — be on their team for a little while. In order to play them well, you need to understand them as much as you can."
The actress will next be seen in the Apple TV+ thriller The Crowded Room, alongside Tom Holland and Emmy Rossum.
"I wanted to do something very, very different from what I did in The Dropout," Seyfried told GMA, adding that though the series chronicling Holmes' rise and fall was "life-changing and fun," it was important to move on to something new. "[In] The Crowded Room, I'm playing somebody who's a mother, an empathetic character, a professor, who's kind of the entry point into this whole show."
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