o get to the Lake Gairdner salt flats from the ELLE office, it’s a two-hour flight from Sydney to Adelaide, and then a one-hour trip in a light aircraft that looks like a remote-control toy. In preparation for the second part of that journey, the fashion team
Photographed by Nicole Bentley Styled by Naomi Smith Words by Alexandra English
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has been packing, weighing and repacking bags for weeks — the plane is so tiny that every kilogram must be accounted for.
It’s unnerving, knowing how crucial the weight distribution is — there are jokes about not having a big dinner the night before, just in case, followed by nervous laughter. The plane is going to be packed full of Christian Dior’s spring/summer 2025 collection, so if they go down, they’ll land in a cloud of tulle: saved by Dior! Cue more nervous laughter. Of course, that’s not going to happen because they’re in the expert care of pilot Ellen Franklin, who nails a smooth landing at a remote sheep station without hitting any kangaroos (does it get more Australian?).
After kissing the ground (so to speak) and texting loved ones, everyone piles into a four-wheel-drive for an hour along a bumpy dirt track. It’s all the same for a while, nothing special. Out of the car, there’s a short walk, and then there it is: a glittering white oasis surrounded by red-dirt hills. It surely can’t be real. And yet … Get closer, and it expands like a puddle seeping under the bathroom door. The lake looks frozen over, but the heat is unrelenting. This is the desert, after all.
Filming ‘apple cider vinegar’ was a homecoming for Alycia Debnam-Carey, whose star is on the rise in Hollywood but whose heart is forever in Australia
Alycia
Debnam-Carey
The shimmering salt lake is a stunning backdrop for Dior’s shiny beads, shimmering tassels and lighter-than-air tulle. It’s also the perfect setting for Alycia Debnam-Carey’s first ELLE print cover. (She was one of our relaunch issue digital covers a year ago.) We’ve caught her on a quick visit to Australia. The Sydney-born actor has been living and working in Los Angeles for the past decade, but whenever the opportunity comes to work at home, she takes it. Recently, she filmed The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart in the Northern Territory outback, and Apple Cider Vinegar in Melbourne and the Dandenong Ranges. “It’s really wonderful being able to work back home,” says Debnam-Carey, who grew up in Western Sydney. “Being able to work in my own accent and with Australian crews was really special. It’s a treat and it’s an honour, especially for a story that’s so ingrained in our culture.”
A “true-ish story based on a lie”, Apple Cider Vinegar is a six-part miniseries that tells the story of the rise and fall of Instagram’s first wellness scammer, Belle Gibson. If you’re not familiar with the story, a quick recap: back in 2013 in the very early days of Instagram, the twentysomething single mother gained a huge following on social media for her wholefoods approach to curing her apparently inoperable brain cancer and for raising large amounts of money for charity. Two years later, things began to fall apart when journalists at The Age received a tip-off from a friend and launched an investigation, finding that no money had gone to charity and her cancer claims were dubious. In 2015, she came clean — kind of. Then she disappeared.
Christian Dior bodysuit,
price on application,
and earrings, $1250. All makeup looks by Dior Beauty.
Gibson fooled everyone, because who is really going to ask for proof when someone tells you they have cancer? She fooled Penguin, which published her popular recipe book The Whole Pantry, and Apple, which nominated her app — the world’s first health and wellness app — as the best food and drink app of 2013. It was briefly pre-installed on all iPads globally. She also fooled this very magazine, which ran a glowing profile on Gibson in 2014 under the headline: “The Most Inspiring Woman You’ve Met This Year”. Extraordinarily, the article begins: “Two things about Belle Gibson are hard to believe: the first is that she’s only 26 years old, and the second is she has terminal brain cancer.” Neither of those things were true.
The article then goes on to explain Gibson’s story as it was deemed true back then: it all started with a stroke at work after struggling with headaches, blurred vision and memory problems. Three weeks later came the cancer diagnosis and the warning that she had “four months, tops”. She reacted poorly to her first round of chemotherapy and instead decided to cure herself with clean eating. “I was empowering myself to save my own life through nutrition, patience, determination and love,” she told ELLE. It wasn’t long before Gibson joined Instagram, where she gained hundreds of thousands of followers by sharing her journey to cure her brain cancer with food. Everyone fell for it.
Christian Dior dress, $23,000, briefs, price on application, and shoes, $4300 (worn throughout).
Christian Dior dress, $10,500 and shoes, $2400.
“Belle’s story was a huge part of the zeitgeist,” Debnam-Carey says. “She was really one of the first social media influencer, wellness creator types at a time that was all about the girl boss. When I was prepping for the role, there were so many friends of mine who had connections to this story. I was telling a friend about it and she was like, ‘Oh my god, I have her cookbook!’ We would have been about 16 when this was all happening, so at a really impressionable age. It just showed to me how far-reaching Belle’s tentacles were.”
Apple Cider Vinegar is named for the golden elixir that to some has healing abilities and to others is a modern snake oil. In it, Kaitlyn Dever stars as Belle and Debnam-Carey plays Milla, a wellness influencer who actually is battling cancer and claims to have healed herself through a program of juices and coffee enemas. Apple Cider Vinegar goes to great lengths to explain that some characters and events in the series have been fictionalised. Milla has striking similarities to one prominent influencer of the era, who we’ve chosen not to name out of respect for her family. Netflix says Milla is an amalgamation of influencers of the time.
What drew Debnam-Carey to Milla was the psychological exploration of the lengths people will go to when they’re in desperate situations, and what makes someone prey on that vulnerability. “[The creator] Samantha Strauss is an expert at being able to give a story and characters a lot of nuance, especially complicated and difficult characters who are making these decisions and choices that we disagree with,” Debnam-Carey says. “There are so many small moments and Sam showcases how someone like Belle or Milla got there, without judgement.”
Christian Dior dress, price on application, bodysuit, $3200, shoes, $2400, headband, price on application, earrings, $1000, rings, $770 each, and bracelets, $1100 each (all worn throughout). All makeup by Dior Beauty.
Belle and Milla aren’t vindicated in this series, instead, it seeks to understand their decisions, because without understanding, there can be no progress. If we don’t treat the societal causes at the root of their perceived evil (in Belle’s case) or arrogance (in Milla’s), it leaves the same doors wide open for someone else to walk through and cause the same damage all over again. “[The show] doesn’t absolve them of what they did; it allows the audience to understand what drives a person to get to that place,” Debnam-Carey says.
So, how did they get here? In the series, Belle is pretending to be battling cancer while Milla is pretending she isn’t. She tells her followers that she has been cured by wellness, meanwhile she’s getting sicker by the day. “Milla is so desperate to fix herself, to not be broken, to not have failed, and believes that she can heal herself,” Debnam-Carey says. That pursuit for perfection leads her to a dark and isolated place. As for Belle’s motivation? Did she fake it to get her mother’s attention? Did she have a different condition, like Munchausen syndrome? Or was it simpler than that? “It seemed like at the end of the day, she just wanted to be liked,” Debnam-Carey says.
Apple Cider Vinegar is a nostalgic trip to the early 2010s, but it stops short of being a period piece, because not much has changed. “It’s just different filters and makeup, now,” Debnam-Carey says. “And everyone has better lighting.” What’s the same is that gaps in Western medicine are still being plugged with figurative coffee enemas. “The show looks at what’s working and what’s not working with modern medicine,” Debnam-Carey adds, referring to the reasons people may feel disenfranchised by the industry. It can be too clinical; it can lack a sense of humanity. Apple Cider Vinegar also investigates what’s not working with wellness, namely that the movement was never meant to be about curing illness; it was about lifestyle. Instead, it’s become synonymous with alternative medicine and blame. Wellness is a state of mind, says the rhetoric — if you’re not well, there must be something wrong with you.
Christian Dior bodysuit,
price on application,
and shoes, price on application.
Debnam-Carey was always going to have a life filled with creativity and storytelling in one form or another. She grew up in Canterbury in Western Sydney, where her father was a session musician and her mother wrote for children’s television. As kids, Alycia and her brother helped their mum paint TV sets and make props like egg carton rocket ships, and Alycia was tossing up whether to become a musician or an actor. Her parents supported both ambitions equally, and when she was eight, she was cast in Rachel Ward’s short film Martha’s New Coat. Still unable to decide between acting and music, Debnam-Carey pursued both. She scored a bit-part in the TV series McLeod’s Daughters, and eventually went to Newtown’s High School of the Performing Arts, where she studied classical percussion. She played with the Berlin Philharmonic at the Sydney Opera House and auditioned at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
Graduation was fast approaching, and with it, a decision. While she was preparing for her Conservatorium audition, it was suddenly clear. She looked at her teacher and said, “I’m going to fly to LA and be an actor.” A year later, she did exactly that.
At just 18, she was living alone and auditioning for roles, and it was all recorded for the ABC series Next Stop Hollywood, which followed six Australians as they tried to make it as actors. Within the first few weeks, she landed the lead in the indie film The Devil’s Hand about an Amish cult. That role set Debnam-Carey down a path of playing dark characters in dystopian worlds. In 2014, she was in the post-apocalyptic series The 100 as army commander Lexa, who quickly became a fan favourite, and then landed a lead role in Fear the Walking Dead, the spin-off of The Walking Dead, as Alicia, a survivor of the zombie outbreak. In 2021, her turn as the titular character in The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, in which Alice grows up orphaned in a women’s refuge, earned her an AACTA nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
And then along came Apple Cider Vinegar. It could have easily become a dark cancer drama, but its pop filter gives the devastation a bright facade, much like an influencer’s social media profile. Milla may not be in a literally apocalyptic landscape but it’s still end times. “I’ve played a lot of really dark characters, I really need to stop,” Debnam-Carey says, laughing. “I only realised recently and I was like, Do I have a problem? But at the end of the day, I’m attracted to complex characters, and they exist in more tumultuous, emotionally fraught situations. They’re the underbelly of the everyday. But I’m so down to do a comedy now.”
Christian Dior bodysuit, $4000, bra top, $2300, and bag, price on application.
LEFT Christian Dior bodysuit, price on application, and earrings, $1250. RIGHT Christian Dior skirt, $55,000, and bodysuit, $3200.
‘apple cider vinegar’ is on Netflix now
Talent Alycia Debnam-Carey Editor JESSICA BAILEY
DIGITAL Editor Alison Izzo
Art Director Hannah Martin
Fashion Director Naomi Smith
Photographer NICOLE BENTLEY
Writer Alexandra english
Hair AND MAKEUP Nadine Monley
Manicure Jocelyn Petroni
Creative Producer Camille Peck / Eminente Creative Production
FASHION DIOR
Beauty DIOR BEAUTY
Location Lake Gairdner National Park ELLE acknowledges The Gawler Ranges People as the Traditional Owners of the Lake
Wearing CHRISTIAN DIOR
This story appears in the March 2025 Issue of
