PHOTOGRAPHY david roemer STYLING Julianna Alabado WORDS harriet sim
Meghann
hen Meghann Fahy logs onto our video call, I’m surprised to see she’s in bed. It’s 10am on a weekday where she is in London, but it’s 5am for her body clock. “I just got here [from New York],” she explains, gesturing to her bedside table where there’s an assortment of
How Meghann Fahy Became Hollywood’s New Scream Queen
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beverages. “I have three drinks going,” she adds with a laugh. “I have a coffee, orange juice and a water.”
She says goodbye to someone off-camera, and it feels fairly safe to assume it’s her boyfriend, actor Leo Woodall, who’s leaving the room. As she settles back against the headboard, I’m distracted by the embroidered heads on the pocket of her hot pink T-shirt.
“It was a Christmas present from my boyfriend,” she says, angling the stitched portrait closer to the camera. “He got me [relationship] merch. It’s a photo of the two of us when we met. It says Sicily 2024 but the year is a typo, it should say 2022.”
The mystery thriller sees Fahy play Violet, a widowed mother who is reluctantly trying to re-enter the dating scene, encouraged (well, forced) by her younger sister, who offers to babysit her son while Violet goes on her first date. She nervously meets Henry (played by Brandon Sklenar; 1923, It Ends With Us), at an upscale restaurant, where the film feels more like a romcom than anything else.
That’s until Violet’s phone starts being bombarded with anonymous AirDropped memes. Violet and Henry assume it’s someone nearby playing a prank, until the messages start to threaten the lives of her sister and son at home, and demand that Violet kill her date. Typical of its director, Christopher Landon – who is a master of horror and thriller – Drop is tense (the buzzing of a phone will never feel the same again), but retains enough comic relief to stop you from biting your nails.
Throughout her career, Fahy has made it clear that she loves to play characters who are more than they appear. The White Lotus’ Daphne is all smiles, pretty dresses and perfectly waved hair, but her easy-breezy façade only lasts a few episodes before it’s revealed that underneath it all she is a master pot stirrer. Not only is her husband not aware that she knows about his infidelity, but he’s also not aware that she’s getting secret payback in the form of her own extramarital activities.
“Playing a character like Daphne, who is so well written, complex and layered, has made me crave that in other roles,” says Fahy. “Once you’ve felt how good that feels and how fun that is, you definitely look for that in other characters.”
She certainly found it in her role as Merritt in last year’s murder-mystery series The Perfect Couple. Fahy’s depiction of a woman having to spend time with her best friend, secret boyfriend (Liev Schreiber), and his wife (Nicole Kidman) at a lavish wedding on their Nantucket island property was brilliant. She perfectly captured the essence of Merritt as a woman who is a nervous wreck trying to keep her cool amid the chaos. The Netflix miniseries went on to be a huge hit, clocking up 20.3 million views in its first four days of airing.
“The show takes place over a long weekend where, as Devon, I’m suspicious that Simone’s in a cult, so I show up to try to get her to come home with me because I need help taking care of our dad, and she does not want to.” It’s dark and sinister but also “a really fun show”, says Fahy. “And I’m still pinching myself that I got to look at Julianne Moore’s face in the flesh because I just love her so much, and I’ve been so inspired by her career.”
Read the full article in the April issue of marie claire Australia.
“You don’t get to choose when success happens or if it happens at all” - meghann fahy
“The thing I loved about it was that it felt very timeless,” Fahy says of the horror film. “It felt like the type of thriller we’d get in the ’90s or the early 2000s, like Speed, and we talked about [the 2005 thriller] Red Eye a lot while we were making it. It’s very contained and it happens in real time. Even reading the script I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, what’s going to happen? How’s she going to figure this out?’ Which, to me, is the sign of a good project.”
Drop comes at a pertinent time, given the recent influx of female-led horror films. In the past 12 months alone there’s been The Substance, a feminist body-horror about the lengths women will go to in the quest to prevent ageing, starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley; Wolf Man, a supernatural werewolf film that’s also a commentary on ambiguous grief, starring Julia Garner; Immaculate, in which Sydney Sweeney plays a young nun slowly realising the terrifying secrets at her Italian convent; and the remake of Nosferatu, with Emma Corrin and Lily-Rose Depp, who is possessed by a vampire during the Plague.
But why horror, and why now? Some fans have noted that recent works in the genre have become more feminist and more psychologically nuanced than horror films of the past, where stereotypically hot, scantily clad female characters were murdered for being the weaker sex.
“Being that broke and struggling that much, there’s still something so cinematic about it”
- meghann fahy
The date and location is a reference to The White Lotus season two, filmed in the town of Taormina. In it, Fahy played Daphne, whose husband is having an affair, and Woodall played Jack, the hot bad-boy whose storyline is one of the show’s main plot twists, so we’ll leave it there. It wasn’t long into filming before rumours started about flirtations between Fahy and Woodall (with Fahy replying, “I don’t kiss and tell” when asked about it on Andy Cohen’s show in early 2023), and the loved-up pair finally hard-launched their relationship on Instagram in February last year.
Fahy and Woodall have since become one of Hollywood’s most talked-about and hardest-working couples. Woodall has recently been on the red-carpet circuit for Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, while Fahy is about to start the media rounds for her new film, Drop.
There’s even a feminist horror podcast, The Final Girls, that explores the intersections of horror and feminism, and investigates how these films allow women to explore their darkest fears in a safe space. They also allow actors to access their full range of emotions, which is perfect for Fahy, given it was her primal scream in the opening scene of The White Lotus that shattered the serenity of the resort, announced her arrival into the zeitgeist and earned her an Emmy nomination.
Fahy also found a complex, layered character in Drop’s Violet, the grieving mother who discovers the lengths she will go to in order to save her threatened family. “Daphne and Violet are very different, but the subtlety that has to happen in both is unique and interesting,” explains Fahy. “With Violet, the stakes really couldn’t be higher. It’s life or death for her, and she has to keep it light so that her date [doesn’t catch on to] what’s happening. Being able to do that was certainly a byproduct of having played Daphne.”
Fahy landed the role of Violet without having to audition – all it took was one coffee with Landon. It was filmed over eight weeks in Ireland, and Fahy appears in nearly every frame, oscillating between light comedic moments and deep terror. It’s an endurance test for acting, and unlike anything she’s done before.
After Drop is the dark comedy Sirens. The Netflix miniseries sees Fahy plays Devon, whose younger sister Simone (Milly Alcock) has developed an odd relationship with her new employer – the philanthropist and animal activist Michaela (Julianne Moore).
“Nothing compares to that feeling of going to an audition and thinking, ‘Any day I could get a phone call and it could change my life’”
- meghann fahy
Meghann wears Chanel top, skirt, belt and shoes.
Meghann wears Ralph Lauren dress.
Meghann wears Ralph Lauren top, skirt, belt and shoes.
Left Meghann wears Ralph Lauren top, skirt, belt and shoes. right Meghann wears vintage Simone Rocha jacket from Cloak Wardrobe; Éterne bra, and shorts; Bvlgari earrings and necklace.
Meghann wears Ralph Lauren dress.
Left Meghann wears Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello jacket and dress, Joanna Laura Constantine earrings; Cartier ring. right Meghann wears Christian Dior dress and briefs; Bvlgari bracelet.
Meghann wears Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello jacket and dress; Joanna Laura Constantine earrings; Cartier ring.
Left Meghann wears Chanel top, skirt, belt and shoes. right All makeup by Giorgio Armani Beauty: Luminous Silk Perfect Glow Flawless Foundation in Fair Peach; Luminous Silk Cheek Tint Liquid Blush in Rosy Peach; Eyes To Kill Classico Mascara in Black; Lip Power Matte Lipstick in Enigmatic.
The making of
All makeup by Giorgio Armani Beauty: Luminous Silk Perfect Glow Flawless Foundation in Fair Peach; Luminous Silk Cheek Tint Liquid Blush in Rosy Peach; Eyes To Kill Classico Mascara in Black; Lip Power Matte Lipstick in Enigmatic.
CREDITS
Talent: Meghann Fahy
Editor: Georgie McCourt
Creative Director: Juanita Field
Photographer: David Roemer/Atelier Management
Stylist: Julianna Alabado/Bridge Artists
Interview: Harriet Sim
Hair: Danielle Priano/Kalpana
Makeup: Samantha Lau/A-Frame Agency
Manicure: Maki Sakamoto/The Wall Group
Prop Styling: Todd Wiggins/MHS Artists
Production: Robyn Fay-Perkins and Lovely Giant
Photography David Roemer
Styling Naomi Smith
WORDS Alexandra English
A
small problem arises every time a new Bridget Jones film starts production: no-one seems to know who the real Bridget is. Is it the Oscar-
winning actor Renée Zellweger, who has portrayed the adored Brit on screen for four films in 20-something years, or is it the award-winning author Helen Fielding, who created the character for a newspaper column in the early ’90s? “Bridget and Renée have merged into the same person for me,” Fielding tells marie claire, “but when Renée and I meet, it’s quite funny and confusing because we both think the other is Bridget. But neither of us is Bridget.”
Everyone is Bridget, and no-one is Bridget – and that’s the genius of Bridget. When the chain-smoking, charming and hopelessly romantic 32-year-old publishing assistant first appeared as the fictional narrator of a column in London’s The Independent newspaper in 1995, she brought with her all the neuroses, insecurities and embarrassments that came with being a woman of the era. She wanted to drink less, smoke less, lose weight, find a man and get ahead at work (would any of that make her happy? Who knew?). Yet when her friends – the real loves of her life – came knocking, she couldn’t help but get swept up in the spirit of their drunken, gossipy evenings, showing up to the office the next day hungover and scruffy. Still, she was lovable for all her foibles and immensely relatable to a generation of women who were emerging from the other side of ’80s power-suit feminism not feeling all that powerful, actually. Sometimes they felt too bloated to wear a pencil skirt, and Bridget showed them that it didn’t make them any less of a woman to admit it.