(CNN) — As Elizabeth Holmes entered prison on Tuesday, Amanda Seyfried shared her thoughts on the Theranos founder’s sentencing.
The actress, who played Holmes on the Emmy-winning series “The Dropout,” visited “Good Morning America” on Tuesday to talk about her new show “The Crowded Room,” saying it was “weird” that while she was there Holmes will begin his sentence at the same time.
Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes in “The Dropout”. (Credit: Beth Dubber/Hulu)
“I feel sorry for those children,” Seyfried said, referring to Holmes’s two young children. “There are two children hanging by a thread here.”
The “Mamma Mia” star, who is also the mother of two children, added that it also affected her “as a parent, as a mother.”
“Life isn’t fair,” Seyfried added, “but in many ways, it’s fair. For her, in particular.”
Holmes was sentenced in November 2022 to 11 years and three months in prison for defrauding investors while running her failed blood testing startup Theranos.
Holmes and Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani—her ex-boyfriend and former Theranos COO, also convicted of fraud—should pay some $452 million to the victims of their crimes.
Amanda Seyfried, left, and Elizabeth Holmes. (Credit: Getty Images/AP)
Holmes founded Theranos in 2003, a start-up that claimed to have invented technology capable of accurately detecting a range of health conditions with just a few drops of blood. The company raised $945 million from an impressive list of investors and was valued at about $9 billion at its peak, making Holmes a paper billionaire. The executive herself graced magazine covers and delivered public speeches wearing a black turtleneck that invited comparisons to the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
His promises about Theranos’s capabilities grew thinner as suspicions arose about the efficacy of the science behind the company’s core product and machinery, culminating in a precipitous fallout that was explored in numerous podcasts, a documentary, and the Hulu dramatization starring Amanda Seyfried.
Holmes, once an icon of the tech world who exemplified Silicon Valley’s limitless ambitions and potential, became the only tech executive to be tried and convicted on fraud charges.
In March, Holmes tried to postpone the start of his sentence on the grounds that he had children. The appeal was denied.
— CNN’s Jordan Valinsky, Catherine Thorbecke and Rachel Metz contributed to this report.
