‘The Dropout’ Music Supervisor Maggie Phillips on Challenges Securing Iconic Songs for the Hulu Show
For The Dropout music supervisor Maggie Phillips, the mission was clear: to transport audiences back to the time when the story of Elizabeth Holmes and the rise and fall of Theranos took place, in the early 2000s and late 2010s.
The Hulu limited series is set between 2003 and 2018, at a time when hip-hop dominated, with artists like Eminem and Kanye West redefining the genre. Phillips tells THR that while the show’s writing team didn’t have much information about what exactly Holmes listened to, they did know that she loved rap and hip-hop.
“We knew she listens to rap and hip-hop, and we knew she loved that Alabama song [“I’m In a Hurry (and I Don’t Know Why)”] that we put in the pilot,” says Phillips. “And that’s all we knew. So we used that as a jumping-off point and then just had fun picking out hits from the time period. [Showrunner] Liz Meriwether really wanted to time-stamp stuff that would scream where we were in each story, because also it was like trying to contain the story and keep people on the line of where we were to follow a 15-year period. We wanted to be pretty specific.”
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Songs that were included in the show were Sean Paul’s “Temperature,” Missy Elliott’s “We Run This,” Kesha’s “Die Young,” Lil Wayne’s “How to Love” and Katy Perry’s “Firework,” among other hits from the past two decades. “How to Love” in particular was featured in a memorable scene in which Holmes, played by Amanda Seyfried, dances with — and tries to seduce — her company’s president and COO, Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews). Phillips says it was the only song considered for the sequence. “It was perfect. It has an easy beat to dance to, it screams that time period, the lyrics work — it just was one of those easy choices,” she says. “It epitomizes that really happy, aspirational, inspirational pop that was very prominent in the Obama era. It’s a modern classic that everyone knows and everyone loves, and I thought it was a perfect choice for that scene.”
Phillips and her team did face some challenges in that “stuff was expensive,” she admits, adding that the Alabama song was difficult to secure, as was “1234” by Feist. The song was in a popular iPhone commercial and had become so deeply associated with the product that the singer-songwriter stopped licensing her music, according to Phillips.
Overall, Phillips — who counts The Handmaid’s Tale, Fargo and most recently Shining Girls among her credits — worked on The Dropout for more than two years. “The way Liz works is we will keep testing songs until we go to mix,” she says. “There were some that we were sold on, but there were some spots that we just kept trying out over and over and over again until we got the one [song] that everyone really agreed was perfect.”
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.