‘I like the underdog thing': Meghann Fahy's rise from underestimated actor to Netflix's Sirens star

Irish Times

21-05-2025

'People underestimate melon,' actor Meghann Fahy said. 'I don't think they give it a chance.'
Fahy was speaking on a drizzly morning in April, two weeks before her 35th birthday, in an Edible Arrangements outlet on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In the first episode of Sirens, a
Netflix
limited series, Fahy's character receives an arrangement, the Delicious Party, which weighs as much as a toddler.
'I dragged that arrangement around for weeks,' Fahy said. Now Fahy had come to make her own, a gesture that felt a little like homage, a little like revenge.
With some help from the store's owner, she set about crafting a more modest assemblage. She combined cut pineapple and melon balls to form daisies, then speared honeydew and cantaloupe on to plastic skewers above a kale base. 'And that's how she stabbed herself,' she said, narrating the activity. 'Sad.'
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Fahy knows what it's like to be underestimated. She performed on Broadway as a teenager in 2009 and then barely worked until 2016, when she landed a role on the go-getting Freeform show The Bold Type, the rare series that makes a career in journalism look fun. She didn't properly break out until 2022, in an Emmy-nominated turn in the second season of HBO's The White Lotus.
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This year, she has her first proper leads, as an imperilled single mother in the date-night thriller Drop, which premiered last month, and as a class-struggle chaos agent in Sirens. Created by Molly Smith Metzler (Maid), the series premieres on May 22nd.
In performance, Fahy typically offers bright emotional colours on the surface and darker ones below. Her mellow prettiness is complicated by a few hard edges, and she tends to leaven the sweetness of her roles with a streak of something wild, almost anarchic.
'She's likeable and very winning and sunny, but she also has this mischievousness,' Mike White, the White Lotus creator said. 'She has a bit of a naughty quality in this nice container.'
Christopher Landon, who directed Drop had said something similar. 'She's this really empathetic, intuitive person,' Landon said. 'But she has a little edge. She's a little bit sneaky and fun.' This was evident while making a bouquet of cut fruit. Let's just say that not all of the chocolate-covered strawberries ended up in the arrangement.
Meghann Fahy. Photograph: OK McCausland/The New York Times
Even now, with two lead roles completed and more to come — starring opposite
Rose Byrne
in an upcoming Peacock series, The Good Daughter, and leading an upmarket film thriller, Banquet – Fahy doesn't really feel she has arrived. She spent too long, like the melon that she was not-so-surreptitiously eating, being overlooked for that. She claims not to mind it.
'I like the underdog thing,' she said.
As a child, in western Massachusetts, Fahy sang. She was paralysingly shy, and the hours leading up to a performance were excruciating. But onstage, she could give herself over to the song, a feeling she describes as addictive.
In high school, she told her mother that she wanted to pursue acting but that she might need some help being brave about it. When she was a high school senior, her mother learned about an open call for Broadway singers and brought her daughter to New York City. Although she panicked the night before, Fahy made it to the audition. She sang an Evanescence song, which impressed celebrated casting director Bernard Telsey. He cast Fahy as the understudy in the Broadway musical Next to Normal. So Fahy spent her late teens backstage, hoping and not hoping that her friend and roommate, actor Jennifer Damiano, would have to call in sick.
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Fahy eventually replaced Damiano as Natalie, the troubled daughter of a bipolar mother. Then the show closed, and Fahy's community evaporated. She scrambled. She hostessed; she nannied; she auditioned, fruitlessly.
'I went through big phases of just being really, really low,' she said. But she never considered abandoning acting. 'Even when I was depressed and broke, I still knew I wanted to be here and I wanted to keep going,' she said.
In those years, she developed what she describes as a 'go with the flow' attitude, cultivated partly out of inclination and mostly out of necessity, so that she could find peace when she wasn't working. She was helped by what she described as 'a deep, deep, deep knowing' that her career would eventually resolve. And it did. In 2016, she was cast in the pilot for The Bold Type, an ensemble dramedy about three friends climbing the masthead of a Cosmopolitan-adjacent magazine.
Aisha Dee, her costar in The Bold Type, admired Fahy's attitude. 'She has an ease about her,' Dee said. 'She flows with the waves of it all.'
Fahy, who had gone into debt, was thrilled to be cast as Sutton, an aspiring stylist. (She was slightly less thrilled when she received her first paycheque: 'I did cry, because I was like, Oh, my God, this has not solved any of my problems.') The job brought her lasting friendships and nurtured her gift for comedy.
If the viewers of The Bold Type were passionate, they were also relatively few, and Fahy could live her life more or less anonymously. That changed with The White Lotus.
She had auditioned for the first season for the role that ultimately went to Alexandra Daddario. White brought her back for the second. She played Daphne, the dippy-like-a-fox wife to Theo James's Cameron. But she somehow brought heart and savvy to Daphne, an oblivious homemaker who can't remember if she voted. Her Daphne was a realist, a hedonist and, like Fahy, a great hang.
White said that her work in front of the camera felt effortless, even mysterious. 'She has the quality that every actor wants: you really like her, but she's elusive,' he explained. 'You want more.'
Fahy described her months on The White Lotus as 'nothing short of spectacular'. She loved the hotel, she loved the surrounding towns, and very quickly, she loved her costar, English actor Leo Woodall, who plays an increasingly sweaty grifter.
'Can you imagine going and having the best experience in the world professionally and also falling in love?' she said. They didn't share any scenes, and Fahy hadn't seen his previous work. Once the show aired, she finally saw him act.
Meghann Fahy described her months on The White Lotus as 'nothing short of spectacular'. Photograph: OK McCausland/The New York Times
'I was like, Oh, my boyfriend's really good,' she said. They now share a home in Brooklyn.
One more good thing came out of The White Lotus: Drop. Landon had watched her season and admired how much empathy she brought to the role, all while sitting at cafe tables. Fahy's character, Violet, out on her first date since her husband's death, is also trapped at a table for most of the movie. (While at dinner, she receives messages from an unknown sender who tells her that if she wants her son to live, Violet must kill her date.) Fahy was an obvious choice.
'No one sits at a table better than her,' Landon joked. Then he turned more serious. 'She has all these different elements and layers to her,' he said. 'We all have our hopes and fears and secrets. She plays to that.'
Fahy likes dimensions. She thinks that if she had ever made it to college, she would have studied psychology, and she enjoys discovering what makes a person tick. She tasks herself with finding the bleeding heart of a character, her vulnerability, the thing that makes her cry.
Her Sirens character, Devon, is all vulnerability, even as she cracks wise and wears enough eyeliner for an entire emo band. When her father receives a diagnosis of early onset dementia and her sister (Milly Alcock) sends a compensatory fruit bouquet, Devon hauls said bouquet to a Nantucket-like island, where the sister is a live-in assistant for a steely philanthropist (
Julianne Moore
), to confront her.
Devon is a fish out of rarefied water. Fahy responded to that, partly because she has rarely felt like the perfect fit for any part — not quite the sexpot, not exactly the airhead, not precisely the girl next door. (She wasn't even the first choice for Devon; other actors declined the role.) She admired Devon's bravery, her tenacity, her willingness to put her few self-destructive behaviours on pause to better advocate for her sister.
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You can see that in first episode, when Devon, a black hole in a sea of pastels, clutching the ottoman-size arrangement of unrefrigerated fruit, debarks from the ferry. Her face conveys anger, fear, sorrow, resilience, curiosity.
'It's hard to imagine that she was ever not the star that she is,' said Nicole Kassell, who directed the first two episodes of Sirens. It seems unlikely that anyone will underestimate her much longer.
At Edible Arrangements, Fahy peeled off her disposable gloves and stood back to admire her bouquet. It was lopsided and arguably overstuffed. Fahy had eaten most of the strawberries. It was an underdog of an arrangement, which felt right, for now.
'Mine's goofy, but I like it,' she said. 'It has character.' – This article originally appeared in
The New York Times
.