Meghann Fahy adds another high-society series to her résumé — but this time, she’s not playing the wealthy one.
In Netflix‘s upcoming series Sirens, created by Molly Smith Metzler (Maid), Fahy plays Devon, a character who comes from a poor upbringing in Buffalo and is spending the weekend on an island, living in luxury, but her main focus is helping her sister Simone (Milly Alcock) leave her boss Michaela Kell (Julianne Moore), a dame of the island’s high society.
When taking on this role, she skipped a phone call to Mike White, asking for any pointers. “I think the character that I played in White Lotus of Daphne and Devon in this show, Sirens, are so polar opposite, in most ways,” she told The Hollywood Reporter of the characters at the premiere Tuesday. “The one storyline that I could identify between those two women is just that they are underestimated. They are not what they appear to be at first glance, and they are misjudged for that.”
In the second season of White’s cultural phenomenon The White Lotus, which follows the privileged lives of vacationers staying at a luxury resort, Fahy’s character Daphne is married to financier Cameron (Theo James). And while the other characters assume she’s superficial at first, she proves to be a lot more complex throughout the series as the dynamics with her husband are revealed.
However, Fahy addressed the similarities between the show’s themes. “Of course everyone’s obsessed with wealth and dissecting it and making fun of it and all those things, so there’s a lot of that happening these days,” she said.
Even though every season of The White Lotus begins with a mystery death, by the end of the show, it could be easy to label who the show’s villain is, but what unravels always makes it more complex than naming just one. And in Sirens, there’s a lot to be said about the class system, too.
“Society is the real villain,” Alcock said. “It’s the pressures that these women have to upkeep. Not only these women, but these men.”
Castmember Josh Segarra thinks the darker moments are because of “greed” and “everyone wanting more.”
Meanwhile, Fahy, believes the show is all about “perception and how we see people and how we misjudge people.”
Sirens drops on Netflix Thursday.
