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Sometimes you have to learn skills quickly in a new job — just ask Meghann Fahy what it’s like to stab someone. (Pretend stab, of course.)
She is not an actor who has much experience depicting acts of violence. But “Drop” (in theaters Friday), a thriller in which she plays a widowed mother whose already terrifying decision to leap back into the dating pool leads to a first-date horror story for the record books, took Fahy to some unexpected places. It explains why she finds herself on a Zoom detailing the learning curve on the art of a picture-perfect piercing cut.
“The act of stabbing someone is really hard to sell and make it look good,” Fahy says with cheeky sincerity, noting the slasher instruction she received from director Christopher Landon of “Happy Death Day.” “I did it on the day, and Chris was like, ‘Come over to the monitor and see.’ It was so bad. He was like, ‘It’s like this’ [slicing air downward with a clenched fist]. He was showing me how to do it because he’s filmed so many. I love learning that stuff. It was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.”
The Blumhouse suspense-fest will put the 34-year-old actor’s nascent stardom to its biggest test. After a Hollywood breakthrough in 2017 playing an assistant at a Cosmopolitan-like magazine on Freeform’s series “The Bold Type,” Fahy’s profile rose precipitously with her turn in the second season of HBO’s popular “The White Lotus” as deceptively un-vacuous housewife Daphne Sullivan.
That performance landed her an Emmy nomination, and the whirlwind has been in full swing ever since. She’s appeared in “The Perfect Couple” and the recent Sundance hit “Rebuilding,” opposite Josh O’Connor. This May, she’ll star in Netflix’s dark comedy “Sirens” with Julianne Moore, and she’s currently in production on Peacock’s “The Good Daughter,” a limited series based on Karin Slaughter’s 2017 novel of the same name, which places her in the company of Rose Byrne. But “Drop” is the first feature film that Fahy has top-lined.
Written by Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach, the film follows Violet (Fahy) as she nervously embarks on her first date in years with a guy named Henry (Brandon Sklenar), a seemingly too-good-to-be-true guy who isn’t scared off by the fact that she’s a widow with a young child who stalled a meetup with three months of texting. Her phone habits during dinner, though, may be the deal-breaker.
It starts out as the jitters of a mom trying to enjoy a kid-free night out but wanting peace of mind that all is OK back home. But when someone in the sleek high-rise Chicago restaurant — the primary location of the film, providing an effective claustrophobic vibe to this pressure cooker of suspense — begins dropping threatening messages to her phone, the date quickly spirals into a gauntlet of survival and primal instinct when she discovers it’s all linked to a home invader holding her young son and babysitting sister hostage and threatening to kill them unless she complies with demands.
It’s a heightened scenario, sure. Peeling back the campy premise, Violet is a survivor of domestic abuse who now spends her time counseling others in similar situations. And that experience of someone feeling trapped by circumstances — romantic, professional or familial — becomes an all-too-relatable idea if you ask Fahy.
“There was a piece of ripped paper that my mom found that my grandma had written that said — I’m paraphrasing — something like: You never know how strong you can be until strong is the only option that you have,” the actor recalls. “And I think that’s true for Violet. We’ve all been in situations that we weren’t expecting to be in, and I think everyone’s had the experience of surprising themselves and the way they were able to move through it, be it a breakup or a health scare or an unexpected event.”
Fahy is beaming in from Atlanta, where she’s about to start another day of filming on “The Good Daughter.” Her hair is slightly damp and, woman to woman, it eventually prompts an aside about the region’s humidity. She pulls up a photo to show her mane during a recent balmy day — “I was like full-on Monica [from ‘Friends’] on vacation. My hair was insane.” The hair was enviably voluminous, not a frizz disaster; Monica Geller would agree.)
But on to more important matters: Fahy listened obsessively to Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” while filming “Drop,” but she insists it was not for inspiration. “It had just come out. And oh, my God, it was on a loop in the morning when I was getting ready to go to set, because once I got to work, you’re in a room with no windows and no sense of what time it is and what it looks like outside. So, I was keeping it light in the mornings beforehand.”
When the subject turns to how triggering vibration notifications — a key sound in the film — may become for viewers after watching “Drop,” Fahy grows animated as she recalls the saga of convincingly generating that suspense.
“Someone was off-camera being like, ‘Buzz ...’ — literally, it was like that,” she says. “There were so many sequences where it was like, ‘She looks down and she sees a meme, and then she looks up at Henry and then she looks down and she sees the security camera.’ There were these sequences where I was seeing different things and reacting to different things, looking at the corner of the camera box, so I had to have someone telling me ‘Then this thing happens, then it’s this thing.’ It was very much a dance between myself and the crew.”
But nothing could have prepared her for the toll of hanging from a harness. One sequence in the film, which gets played up in the movie’s trailer, features Fahy dangling from a shattered window of the restaurant.
“There’s no way to know if you’ve never done it before,” she says. “That was the day that I ended up on my back, unable to breathe or move. Hanging in a harness like that, for long periods of time, is really uncomfortable. It’s hard to breathe. You can’t regulate your nervous system. Then add screaming and panicking on top of that. I had to try to move my body in a very specific way as I was holding on to this rope that was covered by the tablecloths. It was very technically and physically challenging.”
Landon says Fahy’s layered portrayal in “The White Lotus” had convinced him that she was singularly poised to deliver the dexterity and charisma required for a role like the one in “Drop,” which is squarely from Violet’s perspective, pretending like she’s engaged on a date while trying to solve a mystery and protect her son.
“She did most of that sitting at dinner and breakfast tables,” Landon says of Fahy’s concentrated “White Lotus” work. “She is this beautiful hybrid of like a Julia Roberts and a Michelle Pfeiffer — you can’t take your eyes off them. I think that’s what happens when people watch her.”
Not that any of this was something Fahy considered much while growing up in Longmeadow, Mass. Her first love was singing.
“At 8 years old, at my Girl Scout talent show, the first time I ever performed live, I sang ‘What a Girl Wants’ by Christina Aguilera, with butterfly clips in my hair and a satin V-neck from Limited Too,” Fahy recalls. As I nod my head in recognition of that singular late-’90s energy, she says, “You can feel the sparkles from the butterfly clips, can’t you?”
“I had crippling anxiety when I was as a kid,” she says. “I’m much better now because I’ve been in therapy for so long, but it was bad, and they basically had to drag me out onto the stage. But when I sang, I was like, “Oh, my God — I loved that.” Then I was just adding myself to other people’s numbers.”
A trip to New York City for her 16th birthday marked a shift. Her parents took her to see “Chicago” because she was obsessed with the movie. At 18, Fahy packed up and made the move there. She was cast as an understudy in the musical “Next to Normal,” eventually joining the principal cast when the show transferred to Broadway two years later. After securing representation from that production, she started going out for acting roles, including the soap opera “One Life to Live.”
“None of it was anything that I specifically set out to do,” she says. “But then I kind of fell in love with it.” To keep herself afloat, she waited tables and nannied.
“It’s so visceral for me, those moments and that feeling,” Fahy says of the hustle. “I remember when [a] pilot season was a proper thing and you’d have five auditions in one day, and they were all medical procedurals, so it was really hard dialogue to remember. And you’d show up and there’d be literally 30 people in the waiting room. There would be people sleeping on the floor. One time, that was me — I did fall asleep one time. It’s psychotic. It’s a crazy experience to have, but I’m so grateful that I had so many years of that before anything really popped off for me.
“I’m endlessly fascinated by the truth that you don’t really have any control over how it happens or if it happens at all.”
It happened for her. She credits her role in “The Bold Type,” the workplace dramedy that centered on three young women pursuing career success and romance, with launching the rest of her life. Fahy was in her mid-20s when she started the show, and it was her first series-regular job that had her moving between humor and moments of vulnerability.
“I learned so much about myself as an actor and found my comedic sensibility,” she says. The gig, as good as it was, also served as a sobering reality check that a big break still required patience.
“I literally could cry about it right now because I remember when I got ‘The Bold Type,’ I was in debt and I got my first paycheck and I cried because it was so small. They say this number and you’re like, ‘Wow!’ But the way that this money gets taxed, 20% commission, now 25% because I have a lawyer. I thought this was going to get me out of all of my jams. I think about it every single day, like when buying a $7 coffee — because that’s how much coffee is now — and being like, ‘I can do this.’”
For Fahy, plotting life after “The Bold Type,” which ended in 2021, included auditioning for the role of a wealthy but unhappy trophy wife in the first season of “The White Lotus.” The part ultimately went to Alexandra Daddario, but creator Mike White kept Fahy in mind, bringing her on for Season 2 to bring depth to the wealthy spouse of an insufferable finance bro (played by Theo James).
“It was an intimidating set to walk onto because I had just come from ‘The Bold Type’ and this was HBO, this was like friggin’ Michael Imperioli and all these amazing people,” she says. “I was so terrified. But the reason I was good wasn’t even really because of me. It was because everyone else was firing on the top level of their thing. It was very singular in that way. Afterward, when it came out, I didn’t really have any expectation of what was going to happen. And it was a really positive experience, but it was also really chaotic. I had never done so many interviews in my life, and I was like: Am I going to sound stupid? What am I even talking about?”
The Fahy on this video call seems more relaxed in navigating the dance. Even now, she doesn’t seem fazed or annoyed at being asked whether she’ll be watching the Season 3 finale of “White Lotus,” which will drop 48 hours after this video call. “I’m saving the last three episodes. I want to save a day where I can just be in that world for longer than an hour,” Fahy says. “I also have to wait, because I’m watching it with my partner. So that’s the real reason. We have to be together.”
Her partner is actor Leo Woodall, her “White Lotus” co-star who played Jack, a young British boy toy who may be up to no good. The two confirmed their relationship in February 2024 after months of speculation. A desire to maintain privacy as she attains the kind of visibility that has people curious about her dating life is its own type of Hollywood thriller.
“It’s very invasive and super uncomfortable,” she says. “I’ve always been on the other side of that. Even now, I still feel, for the most part, that my life is unchanged. I’m not somebody who can’t go outside and walk down the street without being bothered. But I just felt like, ‘Wow. I see now what this must be like and how awful that can be.’ And so I pretty early on made the decision that if I could minimize that experience, I would like to.”
She’d rather the chatter around her be about her work. But Fahy is not freaking out about striking while the iron is hot.
“I think everything that has happened in my career has so far surpassed any expectation I could have had when I was 18 and I first moved to New York,” she says. “The way that I approach characters is the way that I approach everything, which is one day at a time. I’m really soaking it up and enjoying every part of it that I can because I know how fleeting it all can be. If I never worked again, I would be so proud of everything that has already happened — anything on top of that is just like sprinkles on a dope-a— cake.”
But Fahy has one more thing to share as she makes her official debut as a new Hollywood scream queen.
“I would say, generally, on a date, if your phone is on the table, you’re done,” she offers. “Not hot. But if you’re a mom, who is going to fault you for that? You gotta be available.”
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