Despite Attempting to Stop It, Bumble Founder Pleased With Lily James in Swiped Biopic
Swiped, which had its Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) premiere on September 9 and was released on Hulu and Disney+ on September 19, is a Hulu biopic about Whitney Wolfe Herd, the dating-app entrepreneur who co-founded Tinder and then became a billionaire after founding Bumble. In the film, Herd is portrayed by Lily James (Pam & Tommy, The Iron Claw). Herd herself has yet to see Swiped, and she’s asserted that she has very mixed feelings about its existence.
Whitney Wolfe Herd: A Brief Overview
Herd’s career in the app industry began when she was twenty-two years old, in May of 2012, with a brief stint as a sales representative at the short-lived customer-rewards-app startup project Cardify. In the same year, she became a member of the development team for a dating and social-networking app called MatchBox. She subsequently became vice president of marketing, and was responsible for giving the app a new name: Tinder.
In April of 2014, Herd quit the site that she had co-founded. Since early 2013, she had been romantically involved with another co-founder, Justin Mateen; she has alleged that he became “verbally controlling and abusive,” and that this poisoned her professional life at Tinder and forced her to leave the company. In June of 2014, she sued Tinder for sexual harassment, and the two parties reached a settlement in September.
Near the end of 2014, Herd founded Bumble, a dating and social-networking app that she created with a view towards giving women a safe and comfortable environment for online romance. Within a year of its founding, Bumble had provided 80 million matches. In 2021, Herd took Bumble public; it was then worth $13 billion, and she became the youngest female billionaire in the world.
Herd on Swiped: Mixed Feelings, Largely Apprehensive
Such a fraught but startlingly successful life seems practically to write itself as a biopic, so it was only a matter of time before Whitney Wolfe Herd’s story got the Hollywood treatment. Herd herself, however, has professed to being a bit blindsided by the news of this movie, and not in a good way. In a recent interview with CNBC, she stated that she had no involvement whatsoever in Swiped; indeed, she said, “I was informed about this movie after it was already… off to the races.”
Herd mentioned that she had consulted her lawyer two years ago about the possibility of getting the making of Swiped shut down; her lawyer informed her that it wasn’t in her power to do this because her status as a “public figure” meant that filmmakers were at liberty to dramatize her life story. She bluntly summarized her feelings at the time as: “I don’t want a movie made about me.”
Two years later, it’s clear that Herd has hardly warmed to the project. She stated that she “can’t make it through the whole trailer; it’s too weird for me.” However, she did commend the filmmakers for the actress whom they cast to portray her: “I am honored that they chose Lily James; she’s a very talented actress.”
Will Herd’s trepidation keep Swiped off her to-watch list? The entrepreneur explained that she was still undecided about whether or not to watch the film. “I’m obviously both terrified and maybe slightly flattered,” she said, “But… I think the strangeness and the fear of it outweighs any flattery. So listen: We’ll just see. I guess I gotta get some popcorn and stay tuned.”
