Every Friday throughout the month of March (Women’s History Month), Gawker will be awarding the prestigious Woman of the Week (For Just One Month) title to the female who has made the most significant contributions to nubility, fertility, and maidenhood in the past seven days.
Last week’s Woman of the Week: Delaware’s own Chaney Jones.
First things first: Good morning to the girl reading this ;)
But now, we gotta focus up, sweatie, because I’m crowning. Crowning Gawker’s second ever Woman of the Week (For Just One Month), that is. To be Gawker’s second ever Woman of the Week is still a massively prestigious honor, but it’s not quite first place, is it?
And now, which woman-identifying ingenue does that remind you of?
It’s gotta be Amanda Seyfried, that flossy-haired princess who lives on a farm in the Catskills, who is supremely talented but always playing second fiddle to the likes of girls like Chaney Jones or Rachel McAdams. It’s clear that Amanda Seyfried was not Hulu’s first choice to play Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout, one of 300 current or upcoming shows about the Theranos grift – Kate McKinnon was initially cast, and chose instead to play Carole Baskin in Joe vs. Carole, a show I have never heard of even though I’m pretty sure I watched the first three episodes. That is something McKinnon will have to live with the rest of her life, and we have to thank her for it.
Amanda Seyfried is more of a Kirsten Dunst figure than we give her credit for: an actor who consistently offers technically perfect performances in acclaimed movies and now television shows. Like pre-2022 Dunst, Seyfried is extremely famous, but has never quite arrived. Is The Dropout going to get her there? Maybe not, but she’s got this award now, and that’s got to carry some clout. She can show the Academy or whoever this screenshot.
Listen, I’m not going to lie to you here and say I’ve yet made time in my busy, feminist schedule to watch The Dropout yet (I’ll get around to it!), but I’ve seen that trailer, and the only thing more remarkable than William H. Macy’s forehead prosthetics is her performance. Her take on the character is not a parody or a send-up of Holmes, but a careful study of how she might practice her business girl voice to herself in the mirror.
“This is an inspir— an inspiring step,” she says.
One or two small octaves down for Amanda Seyfried, but a huge leap for women everywhere.
Congrats, Amanda! See you upstate on the next long weekend we have off from work. I’ll bring my dog.
