Jared Leto recalls his ‘quite nice and lovely’ friendship with Elizabeth Holmes before the Theranos fraud was exposed

Elizabeth Holmes poses backstage with her award and actor Jared Leto at the 2015 Glamour Women Of The Year Awards at Carnegie Hall on November 9, 2015 in New York CityDimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Glamour Jared Leto was friends with the disgraced Elizabeth Holmes before the Theranos fraud was exposed. “She was really sweet, really kind,” Leto told Seyfried in a conversation for Variety. Seyfried, who plays Holmes in “The Dropout,” says she’s “in awe” of anyone who has met Holmes.

Jared Leto was friends with convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes before the Theranos scandal broke, he revealed in an interview on Tuesday. After their first meeting in 2015, when he presented her with Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year Award, they stayed in touch and “talked a few times,” he told Amanda Seyfried in a conversation published by Variety.  “She was really sweet, really kind — and no indication that things weren’t great in her life and at the company,” he recalled, per the outlet.

“My experience with her was always quite nice and lovely, and I think what’s interesting about bringing a character to life — not everyone is one thing. “”I liked her a lot,” he added of the disgraced Theranos founder.  Seyfried, who portrays Holmes in the Hulu miniseries “The Dropout,” said she was “in awe” of anyone who has ever spent time with Holmes, given how she was not allowed to meet her.

 “We weren’t allowed to [meet] — she was in litigation,” Seyfried told Leto. “I was never going to meet her, but it was always a dream that maybe we would, down the line. “Holmes founded the startup Theranos in 2003 and claimed that its revolutionary technology would be able to detect medical conditions using only a single drop of blood.

Years later, the technology’s shortcomings and inaccuracies were exposed, along with Holmes’ role in covering it all up. The scandal resulted in a months-long trial in which she was found guilty on three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy. Last month, Holmes asked the presiding judge in her case to overturn her conviction.

Unlike Seyfried, Leto had the chance to meet Adam Neumann, WeWork’s disgraced co-founder, whom he portrayed in Apple’s “WeCrashed. ” While Leto was not expressly forbidden from meeting Neumann, he said he understood that it was not encouraged.  “I think the blanket approach that they [the producers] were taking was that the Neumanns weren’t involved with our project,” he said.

“But I was too curious. I thought that I would regret it if I didn’t meet Adam, and that there was more to be gained than lost. “And so he did.

“We had a top-secret meeting. Nobody knew it was happening,” Leto continued. “I met him, I met his wife Rebekah, I met the kids.

They had a lovely family. It was quite a nice experience on my end. ” Neumann was forced out of WeWork as CEO after the coworking company’s IPO plans blew up in 2019.

After it filed its public-offering paperwork in August of that year, the company faced intense scrutiny from investors and the media over its finances and leadership amid concerns about WeWork’s path to profitability. Read the original article on Insider.