'Apple Cider Vinegar' star Kaitlyn Dever felt 'calling' to play 'twisted' Belle Gibson
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'Apple Cider Vinegar' star Kaitlyn Dever knows all too well the desperate desire to heal what modern medicine can't. Doctors diagnosed Dever's mom, Kathy, with Stage 4 breast cancer at just 39. She died last year, after a 14-year fight.
'In the last few years of her life,' Dever tells USA TODAY,' I became really interested in holistic protocols and other therapeutic things that she could do for her body that weren't conventional," in addition to conventional treatments. 'I became very obsessed with it just because I wanted to look at every option possible for her. So it was interesting timing when ('Apple Cider Vinegar') came into my life.'
Dever described her mother as her 'everything' in an Instagram tribute. 'Nothing I'll ever say will amount to the gifts you have given me in my life, the boundless joy you brought, the deep, endless, unconditional love you gave me and our family,' she writes. 'Your love was everywhere.'
Netflix's six-part limited series dramatizes the rise and fall of Australian wellness influencer Belle Gibson (Dever) who amassed an Instagram following while claiming to manage her terminal brain cancer with whole foods, natural medicine and Gerson Therapy. Gibson promoted her methods in a cookbook and app that was downloaded at least 300,000 times. After all, her cancer was now shockingly undetectable. But that's because she never had it in the first place, as journalists Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano uncovered. They detailed their findings in the book, 'The Woman who Fooled the World,' which inspired the series. In the show, Belle emulates blogger Milla Blake (Alycia Debnam-Carey), who found brief success treating her (real) cancer naturally.
The unchecked influencer is still a threat that Debnam-Carey, 31, recognizes today.
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It's "maybe as rampant and as insidious,' she says. 'TikTok is a great example,' with its constant barrage of hacks and trends. 'The space that it takes up in your brain and then having to do all this research and (gather) information to really make sure that what you're getting is correct, it is constant, and it is just as prevalent now as I think it was then.' She says what all of us tempted by magic pills on social media already know: 'It's so easy to be drawn in by those things, and to feel quite gullible at times.'
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'Vinegar' creator Samantha Strauss says she received a letter from someone who had seen the show and battled breast cancer. 'She's like, 'I wanted to run off and eat some blueberries,'' Strauss recalls. 'That sounds like such a lovely alternative.' Especially compared to the reality of chemotherapy, surgery and radiation. The 3-year-old son of Strauss' best friend has been diagnosed with leukemia. 'The doctors have to put all this awful medicine into his body every day,' Strauss says. Her friend 'has to trust that it's going to work. He's screaming on the bed, and he doesn't understand why it's happening. And she feels like a monster to put him through this.'
In preparing for the manipulative Belle, who relished the sympathy her faked illness won her, Dever thought 'a lot about what amount of hope wellness can bring to people. In our story, we're really trying to convey the idea that this is just a person that is desperate for community and desperate for love and will do anything she can to get that. And a lot of these moments, a lot of these more emotional beats that we were playing out in the show were just a cry for help in a lot of ways.'
The idea of playing the fictionalized Belle, crafted by Strauss in a 'twisted and gripping and kind of funny way,' excited Dever. She also welcomed the challenge of an Australian accent, which Sydney native Debnam-Carey thinks she nailed. And perhaps most heartwarming, the project is one that delighted Dever's late mom.
'I knew it would be difficult subject matter for me to be surrounded by,' says Dever. 'But I know that my mom was very excited. She got to read all of the scripts, and she loved it. She thought it was such a great story, and there was so much excitement surrounding it. So I felt like I just had to do it, and I felt a certain calling to do it.'
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