Jun Sato/WireImage — Gilbert Carrasquillo/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — Amanda Seyfried will now play disgraced tech CEO Elizabeth Holmes, in the Hulu limited series The Dropout, ABC News has confirmed.
Based on an ABC News podcast of the same name, the project initially had Saturday Night Live‘s Kate McKinnon playing the controversial figure, as well as co-producing. She exited the project in February.
Seyfried, fresh off her Oscar nomination for her work in David Fincher’s Mank, will also now produce the limited series.
Holmes dropped out of Stanford University in 2004 and founded the high-tech health company Theranos. Modeling herself in the image of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Holmes raised billions and attracted headlines worldwide based on false claims her company’s technology could test for a spectrum of diseases with just a few drops of blood. However, whistleblowers soon exposed that the gadget never worked, endangering those who relied on its results in lieu of more traditional scans for cancer and other diseases.
The massive scam made Holmes a billionaire, but she was ultimately indicted on nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Riker BrothersBrett Young strikes lucky #7 with his newest #1 single, “Lady.”
The country crooner tops the Billboard Country Airplay chart this week with “Lady,” making for his seventh consecutive hit. He now joins an elite club that includes Luke Combs, Cole Swindell and Zac Brown Band as the fourth artist in modern country music to send his first seven singles to the top of the charts.
Brett’s previous chart-toppers are: “Sleep Without You,” “In Case You Didn’t Know,” “Like I Loved You,” “Mercy,” “Here Tonight,” and “Catch.”
“There aren’t many words to describe how this one feels. I’m still wrapping my head around seven in a row, then for it to be on a song like ‘Lady,’ is so incredibly special,” Brett says. “I’m forever grateful to the fans, radio and all of our partners for embracing it like they have, making it a soundtrack to their lives and sharing their own stories back with me. Thank you all and can’t wait to share what’s next!”
“Lady” is inspired by Brett’s wife Taylor and one-year-old daughter Presley. The singer announced on The Kelly Clarkson Show last week that he and his wife are expecting another baby girl this summer.
Todd Williamson/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty ImagesGarth Brooks has his sights on 2022 as he plots the end of his Stadium Tour.
Garth is among the many artists anxiously awaiting the green light to begin touring again, but regardless of when stadium-sized shows resume, he says that the Stadium Tour will end next year as originally planned.
“What is happening in the summer of ’22, how we end the Stadium Tour, will not be moved. It will end the summer of ’22,” he confirms on Inside Studio Gbefore teasing, “and how it’s going to end, I have to tell you, but I can’t.”
The “Ask Me How I Know” hitmaker has remained optimistic that live events will resume in the near future, after having to repeatedly postpone stadium shows in such places as North Carolina and Ohio. But he hints that when he does return to the stage, it will be “really exciting.”
“I lived through the ’96-’98 World Tour, the comeback tour starting in ’14. I survived all that, but this stadium run is going to get really exciting, really fun once they give us the green light to go,” Garth says.
The next stop on the Stadium Tour is currently scheduled in Las Vegas on July 10.
L-R Thomas Lennon, Ellar Coltrane in “Shoplifters of the World”/RLJE Films(NEW YORK) — Though he may be built like an all-star high school jock, as evidenced in Magic Mike and Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Joe Manganiello actually digs things traditionally liked by guys of his age whom a jock might have stuffed inside their locker.
Manganiello hosts a regular Dungeons & Dragons game, for one thing. He’s also a huge fan of the influential English band The Smiths — so much so, in fact, that he produced and stars in Shoplifters of the World, a new film in which he plays a metal head DJ forced at gunpoint to play The Smiths on the day the band broke up in 1987.
Veteran character actor Tom Lennon admits he judged the book by its cover, too, when he and Manganiello met on the set of 2012’s box-office dud What to Expect When You’re Expecting.
“[M]y first day on the movie and I’m like, ‘I don’t know if me and this guy are going to be friends,'” Lennon recalls. “He’s six-seven..300 pounds of solid muscle. He doesn’t even drink water some days, Just so he can be extra yoked.”
“Cut to about 20 minutes later. We are best friends,” Lennon continues. “And I think a big reason for that was we very quickly learned that we both…treat The Smiths almost like a religion, basically.”
He adds, “That’s sort of how I came into the picture was Joe Manganiello just sitting here in Atlanta while we’re making that movie that everybody loved so much (laughs) What to Expect When You’re Expecting — what you didn’t see is all the downtime is Joe doing chin ups and me eating pizza pockets right next to him talking about The Smiths all day long. That’s what was really happening on that picture.”
Lennon, whom Joe recruited to play a record store owner in the movie, admits his Smiths fandom goes deep. “I have a Wikipedia page…I wrote some movies and I was in some movies, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Who cares? When you get into the part of my Wikipedia page that I’m super proud of…it says ‘Thomas Lennon is close friends with Weird Al Yankovic and he occasionally plays guitar in the Sweet and Tender Hooligans, a tribute to Morrissey and the Smiths.'”
As far of the plot of Shoplifters of the World, Lennon offers, “Whether it’s a true story or not, I don’t know if that’s ever been really corroborated. I know Morrissey always says it’s a true story, always.”
Featuring 20 Smiths songs, the film that also stars Boyhood lead Ellar Coltrane and Helena Howard is now available on demand.
Trae Patton/NBCGwen Stefani attributes fiancée Blake Shelton for helping her maintain a youthful appearance.
Speaking recently to Australia’s Daily Telegraph, the 51-year-old pop superstar opens up about her views on aging, especially where it concerns women and celebrities.
“It’s really hard for everyone to age and have to face life. Especially for females and people who have been in the spotlight, it can be daunting,” she says, explaining how she rises above the pressure. “You tackle it by just trying to be the most beautiful version of yourself inside and out. People talking about my aging is a compliment, I guess. I’m kind of obsessed with how I’m aging, too.”
But when asked to divulge her secret to youthful-looking skin, Gwen says she doesn’t rely on creams or surgical enhancers. Instead, she credits her happy and healthy relationship with the “God’s Country” singer for her youthful glow.
“Blake is the greatest guy. I look back over the past few years and look at pictures of when I first started kissing Blake, and I look the best I’ve ever looked in my life in those photos,” she claims. “Love must look good on me. I feel like that does show through — it really does.”
Gwen and Blake met in 2014 when shooting The Voice, though Gwen admits that at the time, “I had no idea who he was.”
The couple has sent two duets to the top of the country charts over the past year with “Nobody but You” and “Happy Anywhere.” They announced their engagement in October but have yet to reveal a date for their wedding.
Jun Sato/WireImage — Gilbert Carrasquillo/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — Amanda Seyfried will now play disgraced tech CEO Elizabeth Holmes, in the Hulu limited series The Dropout, ABC News has confirmed.
