How Meghann Fahy Found Common Ground With Her ‘Sirens’ Character

When Meghann Fahy read the first script for Netflix’s limited series “Sirens,” she loved it so much that she did everything in her power to chase after it. “There were other people who were up for it, but I really, really wanted it,” Fahy said.

Adapted for television by Molly Smith Metzler from her 2011 play “Elemeno Pea,” the series finds fireworks unfolding over an eventful Labor Day weekend at a lavish beachside estate where manicured lawns, perfectly trimmed hydrangeas and Lilly Pulitzer-wearing clones abound. Fahy’s sex-and-alcohol-addled character, Devon — the heartbeat around which “Sirens” revolves — represents the antithesis to the cultish world of wealth and opulence that’s portrayed over the five darkly comedic episodes. 

As the series begins, Devon is desperate to rescue her younger sister, Simone (Milly Alcock), who’s gladly traded in her lower-middle-class life for fancier perks as the personal assistant to socialite Michaela Kell (Julianne Moore). Devon reluctantly integrates herself into what is a seemingly picture-perfect lifestyle, but nothing can prepare her for how murky the waters truly are and how entrenched her sister is. 

“As soon as I read the pilot, I knew who she was,” Fahy said. “I could picture her. I could really connect with her. I think everybody has had an experience in their life where they feel like they haven’t belonged somewhere. It’s so satisfying to watch her move through that world and get it wrong so many times but be so relentlessly herself.” 

It’s a space Fahy has become deeply familiar with. All by happenstance, of course. After her breakthrough Emmy-nominated role as the obliviously rich housewife Daphne Sullivan in Season 2 of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” Fahy found herself orbiting similarly themed shows, including last year’s Netflix miniseries “The Perfect Couple,” set at a luxurious Nantucket wedding that gets derailed after her character is murdered. 

“It’s funny because people draw that conclusion between some of the other projects that I’ve done, which take place in an environment with super-rich people — and that is true,” she acknowledged. “But character-wise, Devon is someone I just love so much on the page and I really, really wanted to do something different.” 

Despite the familiar setting, “Sirens” gave the 35-year-old actress the opportunity to live inside the skin of a character who felt “a little bit more true to me and who I am than some of the other stuff that people have seen me do — [specifically] how she uses humor, how no-frills she is and how sarcastic she can be,” Fahy said. “I’ve played a lot of people who are a little bit more polished, so I loved her messiness and her tomboyishness.” It was also easy for Fahy to lock into Devon, who serves almost as the audience surrogate. “She’s going against her environment, and that’s where a lot of her comedy comes from.” 

Fahy singles out the pulsating eight-page opening scene from the second episode, where Devon jumps off a yacht, swims to land in the dead of night and confronts Simone at Michaela’s mansion in an extreme attempt to bring her home. Emotions run high in the crucial bedroom scene as the sisters verbally spar over their diverging lives. 

“It’s really hard when you’re filming a scene like that, which has moments of real humor and moments of real anguish and these emotional beats between these two sisters,” she said. “We got to shoot that entire scene, all eight pages, in one take. We had to do it a bunch of times of course, but [director Nicole Kassell] figured out a way for us to do it in real time, which is so rare and was so helpful for Milly and me because the scene ramps up. And it’s hard emotionally to get from A to B if you have to stop in the middle.” 

It’s an accomplishment Fahy thinks fondly of when she looks back on her time making “Sirens” last summer. “In my career in general, I won’t ever forget that.”

This story first ran in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.

Read more from the Race Begins issue here. 

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