Meghann Fahy Says Her ‘Sirens’ Role Was Unlike Anything She’s Done Before: “I’ve Never Loved a Character This Way”

When the trailer for the Netflix limited series Sirens dropped, a viewer commented, “This is the third show I’ve seen where Meghann Fahy is losing her mind on a beach but looking great while at it.” That lavish coastal settings and excessive wealth is a common thread of her latest projects — The White Lotus, The Perfect Couple and Sirens — is not lost on the actress.

“I guess audiences want to see rich people behaving badly in nice places!” she tells THR with a laugh. “I didn’t realize I had done three of those shows in a row until someone pointed it out to me after Sirens. Then I was like, ‘Oh shit, I gotta do something else.’ ”

Here, Fahy, who played Daphne on the Italy-set season two of The White Lotus, talks about her Emmy contenders The Perfect Couple and Sirens, whether she feels typecast and why she might be done with water work for a while.

Let’s start with The Perfect Couple. What made you want to play Merritt?

Merritt seemed like somebody who desperately wanted a family. To me, that’s her motivation, and I found that really fascinating. Obviously, she has a really bad weekend, and the affair is horrible, but I was approaching it from a standpoint of, this is just a girl who’s really lonely, who doesn’t have a family to call her own, and she really wants to create that for herself.

I read that the flash mob scene in the opening credits was not something you all wanted to do. Is that true?

Oh, it’s very true. None of us wanted to do it. I really struggle with learning choreography. That’s kind of my Everest, but yeah, we were all like, “This is insane!” We were all really surprised that on the day of doing it, we were just having so much fun, and it was effective in its way. People talked about it — I guess that was what they were going for. But we were just like, “Whose idea was this? This is so random.”

Talk to me about your dead body cast.

One of the crazier experiences of my life was getting a “lifecast” [a body dummy]. It took all day — they do your head first, then your arms, midsection, legs, your feet and your hands separately. They pour thick silicone, and then they put plaster on top of that, which creates a chemical reaction that causes intense heat. It was really uncomfortable. I had to meditate through it. … But it’s great, because then you don’t have to be in the water as much, which is also really hard. The first time I ever had to do anything in the water was The White Lotus, the opening when I’m running. That seemed like not a lot of water work, as it’s called, but we filmed that for so many hours, and at the end of the day, my whole body was shaking. In The Perfect Couple, Dakota [Fanning] and I had to do so many different versions of walking into the actual water, and then we had a whole day where we filmed at a pool, and then it cuts together and it looks like not that much time in the water, but it was. I had never experienced that before. Jack Reynor [Fahy’s Perfect Couple co-star] was like, “If I read a script and there’s water in it, I’m not doing it.” He was like, “I’ve done my time.” It’s really tedious. I definitely will be paying more attention in the future to anything that involves water in the script.

What about the mystery/murder mystery genre you hit with The White Lotus, The Perfect Couple and Sirens lately? Plus, you just did Drop.

It is a genre that I love to watch, and then I think Sirens, for me, was less that, and more kind of the dark comedy component to it, because that’s another genre that I love. When I signed on to do Sirens, I had only read the first episode, so I didn’t even really know where it was going to go, which was really fun to find it out as we were making it.

At the heart of Sirens lies the relationship between the two sisters. How did you and Milly Alcock develop that relationship ahead of shooting?

It happened naturally. I do feel protective of her as an older sister, and the way that you see Devon being on the show, I feel that way about Milly. I was such a fan of hers before meeting her, and then, we were going to be New York, which is where I live, and so she came, and we hung out together alone a bunch before we started filming. We just had a very easy connection in that way. It’s so funny, because Milly, in real life, is a little bit more energetically like Devon — she’s a little more punk in real life — so I think for her, it was easy to drop into those dramatic moments.

But instead, you got to play the “punk” character.

I loved it. I read the pilot and I was like, I have to do this. I’ve never loved a character this way, and it’s so different than anything I had ever done before. I was like, I hope that they will let me step into this space, because the thing that happens a lot in this industry is, if you haven’t done it before, people are a little skeptical. Everybody is more comfortable asking you to do something that they’ve seen you do before.

Does that lead to a slippery slope of being typecast?

I think so. Most people met me for the first time as an actor on White Lotus, and I love Daphne, but I’m so different than her energetically. Devon’s comedic sensibility aligns more with who I feel I am. And so I’ve always wanted to step into a role like that. There’s something so liberating about playing a character like Devon who literally doesn’t give a fuck about anything, at least on the surface. I wasn’t thinking about what my hair looked like or what my makeup looked like, because she wasn’t either. It was really freeing.

What was your most challenging scene on Sirens?

There is a scene in episode two between Milly and me, where I come to bust her out in the night and she doesn’t want to go. It’s this eight-page scene of dialogue, and it’s very rare that for television you get to do an eight-page scene, so that was exciting in and of itself. And then we were able to shoot it sort of in one take, which is also unique. It was so useful because the scene becomes very emotionally charged between the two of them. … That was one of my favorite days I’ve ever had on any set. It was so special that everyone came together to service the emotional landscape of what we were doing.

What was your way to decompress after some of the harder scenes?

When I was doing Sirens, I started Dawson’s Creek. I would just watch it in my trailer or in my room, and I was just rolling through and it was such a different world that I was able to just kind of disconnect in that way.

You’ve been extremely busy and it looks like you have no plans to stop. Can you tease a little bit about your upcoming projects, The Good Daughter and The Banquet?

I’m in the middle of filming The Good Daughter right now. We finish end of June. It’s really intense. The story is pretty dark, and it’s an incredible cast: Rose Byrne and Brendan Gleeson, who I just shot my last scene with yesterday, and I was just kind of pinching myself, because I think he’s a legend, and I think Rose is too, honestly. I’m having a blast, but it’s definitely a really intense shoot, lots of the Southern dialog, which is beautiful, but it’s so melodic. … I think we’re supposed to finish Banquet mid-December, and then it’ll be the holidays. And I’m already thinking about where my next little travel moment is going to be. That’s how I treat myself after I’ve been really busy, is planning a trip to somewhere I’ve never been before.