Meghann Fahy wants to show me her phone. “It just keeps going!” she says, turning the device around so I can view a Note on her screen that is at least six thumb-scrolls long. It’s a list called “Memoir Titles” that she and her best friends have kept for years, with entries including “Yesterday Was Hell, But I Liked It,” “This Is the Saddest Thing That Has Ever Made Me Laugh,” and “Violently Ambitious.”
That last one sounds like it could be an apt description of the whirlwind few years the actress has had since earning an Emmy nomination for her breakout performance in the Über-popular second season of HBO’s The White Lotus, but Fahy demures. “I wish I could claim ‘violently ambitious,’” she says, settling into the cozy booth opposite me at Brooklyn Public House in Fort Greene and wearing a decidedly laid-back navy cable-knit sweater and jeans. “I think I’d be in a much better place in my career if I was. I’m somebody who’s a bit go-with-the-flow.”
Not that you could tell from Fahy’s recent gigs: Since White Lotus, the 34-year-old has brought her emotional intensity and zingy comedic timing to high-profile projects like the mystery series The Perfect Couple with Nicole Kidman and the recent Sundance hit Rebuilding opposite Josh O’Connor. This May, she’ll star in another dark-comedy limited series for Netflix, Sirens with Julianne Moore, and is preparing to film Peacock’s The Good Daughter, a limited series based on the Karin Slaughter novel of the same name, with Rose Byrne. In the meantime, she’ll top-line Blumhouse’s horror flick Drop, in which she plays a widowed mother who, while on a first date, is terrorized by a series of anonymous drops to her phone that instruct her to kill the guy across the table or else watch her son get axed live on a home security camera.
“The thing that attracted me to the script was that it felt like an old-school thriller,” she says over a platter of vegetarian nachos, bowls of French onion soup, and icy Diet Cokes. The part involved major physical stunts, interacting with things that weren’t really there (you know, like memes that threaten to kill your child), and carrying an entire film while appearing in nearly every single frame. “I was really excited by it being something I’ve never done before,” she tells me.
All it took was one coffee meeting between Fahy and Drop director Christopher Landon in February 2024 for her to land the role, no audition needed. During the film’s eight-week shoot in Ireland, Landon says Fahy took it upon herself to make sure the cast felt comfortable with each other, even, according to the director, “dragging all of us into a gay bar.” After two days on set, he saw how boundless Fahy’s onscreen talent could be. “She had to vacillate between horrible things that were happening at the end of the movie and the gentle, soft things that were happening at the beginning of the movie,” the director says. “It was absolutely seamless. Her access to her emotions, her fear, her vulnerability, it was so instant.”
With a genre-bending résumé like hers, Fahy can convincingly shift from playing the warmest, most fun person at the party to the final girl, screaming for her life. After Drop premieres on April 11, Landon predicts, “Hollywood will see her in a very different way. They’re going to see that she’s actually a leading lady. She’s a movie star.”
Fahy grew up in Longmeadow, a town of about 15,000 people in western Massachusetts, among a huge extended family, most of whom lived nearby. “I have 100 uncles and 75 cousins,” she jokes. “When I go home, it’s just one party.” As a child, she dreamed of being a singer, and at 8 years old, she performed for the first time, singing Christina Aguilera’s “What a Girl Wants” in her Girl Scout talent show. (Yes, there’s video proof somewhere thanks to one of her grandparents.) Until then, Fahy experienced “pretty crippling anxiety about everything leading up to actually performing.” But once she was onstage, she wanted more. “That moment is a core memory for me,” she says.
Her mother, an occupational therapist at the local elementary school, helped Fahy move past her anxiety. “I sat her down when I was really young and I said to her, ‘I need you to push me outside of my comfort zone. I’m nervous all the time, but I like this and I want to see what this is. Will you help me?’” Fahy remembers. At the encouragement of her mom, throughout her childhood, Fahy would take her speaker, microphone, and karaoke tracks she burned off Napster and sing at 5-year-olds’ birthday parties, college basketball and hockey games, and in the basement for her extended family, accompanied on piano or guitar by her older brother.
In 2008, when she was 18 years old, Fahy ditched college plans after she was cast as an understudy in the musical Next to Normal. Within two years, the show had transferred to Broadway, where she became a member of the principal cast. She filmed the soap opera One Life to Live by day, hit the stage at night, and was absolutely in love with New York City. “The rhythm of it makes sense to me,” she says. “The literal walking from place to place and putting my headphones in — it’s how I process things.”
After Next to Normal closed in 2011, Fahy worked as a nanny and a hostess at the downtown café the Grey Dog while she auditioned incessantly. She landed guest spots on procedurals like Law & Order: SVU and Blue Bloods, but when she auditioned for musicals, she found herself in rooms with actresses who were trained at conservatories. The experience chipped away at her confidence. “That shit is so hard and can be so fucking embarrassing,” she says, shuddering.
Eventually, Fahy ditched musicals in favor of dramatic acting. She even declined to audition for the role of Galinda in Wicked long before the 2024 film went into production. “I knew it was never going to be me anyway,” she says, before adding that she’d be “super open” to any other musical opportunities that might come her way in the future.
Her next role — The Bold Type’s charming and hardworking fashion stylist Sutton Brady — would put her on the TV map. It was 2017, and she headed to Montreal to film the series. Melora Hardin, who played the tough-but-tender boss at a Cosmopolitan-style magazine, would host Fahy and her co-stars Katie Stevens and Aisha Dee for sleepovers or dinners or the random glass of wine just to, as Hardin told me, “shoot the shit.” To this day, Fahy considers Stevens and Dee two of her real-life best friends.
A rom-com dressed up as a workplace dramedy, The Bold Type gave Fahy a chance to show off how easily she can move between high jinks and nuanced vulnerability. But with a “loyal but sort-of-niche” fan base, the series never became a ratings juggernaut. As she thought about her post–Bold Type move, Fahy auditioned for a part as a newlywed in the first season of The White Lotus, and though that role went to Alexandra Daddario, creator Mike White slotted her into season two, where she flew to Sicily and gave a razor-sharp performance as Daphne, a wealthy wife who refuses to be victimized by her douchey husband’s bad behavior (and maybe even kind of likes it). “I often wonder how it would have felt if it had happened ten years earlier,” Fahy says of the “moment” the show gave her in 2022. “There’s no better or worse version. None of us have any control over when that happens or doesn’t.”
Fahy’s cast mates, many of whom she remains tight with today, watched her closely. “To play a character that on paper is ‘airhead mum’ and to turn her into this really intriguing, layered human being, was extraordinary,” says Will Sharpe, who appeared alongside her in the series. During one scene in which Daphne tries to remember if Puerto Rico is a country or a territory, Sharpe says, “She just did this thing where, very quietly, she made her brain disappear for a second. That was the point where I was like, ‘You’re really funny.’”
The industry took notice, which led to more high-profile projects, like The Perfect Couple, and now Sirens. Julianne Moore, Fahy’s co-star on Sirens, called Fahy a “stealth performer” who can deftly balance comedy with drama, emotional wreckage with zippy one-liners. On the show, which filmed for a few months last year in New York, Fahy goes toe to toe with Moore, playing sort of against type as an outsider in a snooty town filled with Lily Pulitzer–wearing characters. “She makes everything look easy, but she has tremendous depth of emotion,” Moore told me via email. “It is palpable when you work with her.”
Now that Fahy has had her “moment” — ”I hate that word,” she admits, though we both concede that it is what she’s experienced over the past few years — she’s thinking about her future. That includes planting roots in Brooklyn and privately pursuing medical issues that doctors ignored in her past. For years, Fahy suffered from cystic acne, really painful periods, and “all kinds of symptoms,” and was told by doctors that nothing was wrong. “I tried everything, every diet. I would wake up before I went to set on The Bold Type at 4:00 a.m. and juice and all these things, and nothing helped. I was so insecure about it.”
A few years ago, she visited a celebrity gynecologist in Los Angeles. “She took one look at me and she was like, ‘Oh, you have polycystic ovary syndrome,’” a hormonal disorder that studies say affects 5 to 10 percent of women, though many experts suggest the rates are much higher since so many patients are never diagnosed. Fahy was relieved to put a name to what was going on inside her body, but it also made her furious that so many doctors had disregarded her ailments. “You don’t even realize you’re being gaslit until someone validates your pain.”
There are countless reasons a movie star might not want to divulge the details of their private health concerns with a stranger. But Fahy, mellow and amiable, thinks it’s an “important conversation” to have: As a result of the PCOS diagnosis, she lost one ovary and decided to freeze her eggs last February. “There’s so much pressure on women even in their 20s to freeze their eggs. Part of you is like, God, this is such an expensive, laborious, and emotionally and physically taxing insurance policy. And yet, the flip side of the coin is like, Wouldn’t I go through this just so that I could have the life that I want?” she says, easygoing yet resolute. “I’ve always imagined that I would have a family, but I’m also somebody who knows that if I didn’t, I would have a full life.”
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, Fahy focuses her attention on the next few days, not decades. Prior to lunch, Fahy had received an IV drip of fluids, hoping to stave off a winter cold before heading on a breakneck trip that would start at Sundance to promote Rebuilding and end in London at the world premiere of Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, which features her boyfriend and White Lotus co-star Leo Woodall. After months of speculation about their romance, the two confirmed their relationship in February 2024. “It was never a secret,” Fahy says. “We just are private people, and I think that it’s something worth protecting.”
As both of their careers have exploded — he became the boy of our dreams in Netflix’s megahit One Day — Fahy says she’s grateful to be partnered with someone who gets it. “Some actors say, ‘Oh, I could never date an actor.’ I get that, but it works for me,” she says. “I don’t think I could ever date someone who wasn’t in the industry in some capacity, whether it be a director or a writer. The experiences that you’re having are so insane and specific. To have a partner who you can make eye contact with across the room and feel seen and have that person be like, ‘I know,’ to me is the greatest gift.”
If these musings sound like they’re coming from someone who’s worked some shit out in therapy, that’s because Fahy has done exactly that. She credits her therapist with helping her work through the mindfuck of being in such a public-facing industry where rejection is part of the grind and your personal life is on blast. “Everything before White Lotus, I felt on the outside of the craziness,” she says. “When I’ve had a tiny taste of being on the inside of the craziness, I’m learning this is a ladder, and you’re always climbing. There is always the next rung, and a new pile of problems when you get there.” Like how to simply be among the glitz and glam. “I never feel like I belong in those spaces,” she says. “The more people I talk to, the more they say, ‘I feel that way, too.’ But anxiety does that, right? It makes you feel alone when really none of us are.”
With a year of filming, fashion shows, and festivals lined up, I wonder what this actress would like to do next. Fahy thinks for a moment. “I am not a person with lists. If you asked me right now five directors I’d love to work with, I would throw up and pass out,” she says, then pauses. “But I do want Kate Winslet to direct and I do want to be in something she directs.” Fahy chooses her work based on a gut feeling, and maybe one day she’ll produce with a partner, but there’s no five-year plan laminated in a binder (see: that go-with-the-flow vibe). Until then, she’ll keep plucking poignant and funny observations from daily life and adding them to that never-ending iPhone Note. One day, when she’s ready to reflect on it all, the perfect memoir title will be right there waiting for her.
