If you’ve been watching Elizabeth Meriwether‘s The Dropout (Hulu), you know she’s very exacting about strong resemblances between the principal characters and the actors who play them, either naturally or by way of makeup.
Amanda Seyfried (Elizabeth Holmes), Naveen Andrews (Sunny Balwani), William H. Macy (Richard Fuisz), Sam Waterston (George Schulz), Camryn Mi-Young Kim (Erika Cheung), Laurie Metcalf (Phyllis Gardiner), Kurtwood Smith (David Boies) and Kate Burton (Rochelle Gibbon) all generally and in some cases very specifically “look” the part.
A highly significant role is that of Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who broke the 10.16.15 story about Theranos being a dubious operation regarding its blood-testing technology.
When the Theranos story was being researched, edited and published, the Journal‘s editor-in-chief was the British-born, conservative-minded Gerard Baker, whose tenure was from March 2013 until June 2018.
And yet Gerard is absent from The Dropout. In his place is a female editor named “Judith Baker”, who’s played by LisaGay Hamilton, a respected stage and TV actor who’s best known as “Rebecca Washington” on The Practice (1997-2003). She also played “Celia Jones” on the Netflix’s House of Cards (’16).
Why did Meriwether abandon her realistic, life-like casting aesthetic when it came to the Gerard Baker character? Why did she switch genders and hire a woman of color to play a namesake stand-in?
The most likely answer is that Meriwether decided to “woke”-switch Gerard into Judith because it’s expected and politically necessary these days to hire at least two or three (if not more) POCs to avoid looking too Wonder Bread, no matter the time period or what the facts are or were.
Another theory is that four years ago Gerard Baker got into a little trouble at the WSJ for seeming to harbor troubling (i.e., possibly racist) views about the Ahmaud Arbery shooting. So he’s regarded by woke WSJ staffers as a tainted figure to some extent, and perhaps Meriwether felt that casting a woman of color would somehow balance that situation out. Go figure.
