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This year is already a bonanza for true crime junkies, with ready-to-devour fare like The Tinder Swindler and Inventing Anna seemingly dropping every week,
Hulu’s latest entry into the fray, The Dropout, based on the real-life Theranos scandal, is already picking up a solid fanbase and a lot of them are wanting to know just who breakout character Ana Arriola is. Is she based on a real person? And did she really tell Steve Jobs that the black turtleneck look was the way to go?
The answers are, a little yes, a little no, and, well, maybe. Arriola is very much real, but they aren’t exactly the person being portrayed onscreen, although they’re definitely on the same page.
Yes, Ana Arriola is a real person. They were the Chief Design Architect for Theranos, handpicked and recruited by Holmes herself to head up efforts to design and build the rapid blood testing machine that she promised would revolutionize the medical industry. At the time Holmes recruited her, Arriola was senior product line manager at Apple, where she helped develop the iPhone. But she did not work for Holmes for very long.
Upon coming to understand that Theranos was built upon a house of cards, Arriola, “understood her fraud and left Theranos”, according to Decider . “When I took the job as Elizabeth’s Vice President and Chief Design Architect, I was an eager employee blinded by fame and opportunity and the cult of working for Elizabeth. She was on her fast ascent, convincing everyone that her science fiction project was real and could change the world.”
Arriola not only left Theranos, but was one of the first people to work with The Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou on his 2018 exposé of the company. They are currently the director of product design and research for Microsoft’s PhysOps Studios.
As far as the onscreen version? Well, it’s fairly accurate. Arriola is portrayed in The Dropout by One Day at a Time actor Nicky Endres, an Asian-American non-binary transfeminine queer actor, whereas Arriola describes herself on her LinkedIn page as “a queer mother of three, Latinx lesbian of trans and nonbinary experience, working within our professional multicultural global community.” (Arriola uses both they/them and she/her pronouns). Arriola seems to own her online portrayal, even sending the actor a Twitter shout-out welcoming them to “our queer familia.”
So, about the turtleneck thing? Well, Arriola wasn’t giving Jobs any fashion advice per se, but she did give Holmes some upfront fashion advice. In the series, the stylish Ana points out to the then-rumpled Holmes that she doesn’t look the part of a CEO. In a 2019 interview with Elle, Arriola admitted that she passed on the name of Jobs’ turtleneck designer to Holmes. “I’m like, ‘Hey, this is who designed [his turtlenecks], this is the aesthetic, and we can go after it,’” Arriola said. “And, sure enough, she did.”
“But it wasn’t her own personal style,” she added. “She copied other people… She was 120% fake.”
The dropout airs Thursdays on Hulu.