Wellness gone sour
Apple Cider Vinegar tells the ‘true-ish’ story of an Australian wellness influencer who claimed to have cured her terminal brain cancer. Showrunner Samantha Strauss discusses her interest in bringing it to the screen and working with star Kaitlyn Dever.
With credits including The End and Nine Perfect Strangers, writer and showrunner Samantha Strauss is now preparing to leave her home in Australia and spend eight months living in Ireland – the location of her next project.
It’s where Netflix will be filming Grown Ups, an adaptation of Marian Keyes’ novel of the same name produced by Picking Scabs, the label run by Strauss in partnership with See-Saw Films (Slow Horses, Heartstopper).
The ensemble family drama is based on three couples – Nell and Liam, Cara and Ed, Jessie and Rory – who, like most families, are a complicated bunch, with ever-shifting politics and old and new resentments, but bound together by a whole lot of love.
“We go into pre-production in June so it’s just a minute away, but it’s based on a novel by Marian Keyes, who I love, and I’m moving to Ireland. We’ll be shooting until February, so I’ll be there as much as possible across that period,” she tells DQ.
The premise is a far cry from Strauss’s most recent project, Apple Cider Vinegar. Another Netflix series, the show is based on a non-fiction book.
“I really like adapting non-fiction because you’ve got these facts that are tentpoles you can hang things on, but then you do such a lot of imagining on the inside,” she says. “Adapting a novel by Marian is also a bit of a dream for me, but I loved doing something that was true-ish.”
‘True-ish’ might be the best way to describe the story told in Apple Cider Vinegar, which is described as being inspired by a true story based on a lie. Unbelievable and The Last of Us star Kaitlyn Dever plays Belle Gibson, a real-life Australian wellness influencer who claimed to have cured her terminal brain cancer through health and wellness.
As it turned out, it wasn’t true – neither the cure nor the illness, which she discussed and shared through social media, her own app and a cookbook.
But Belle’s story is just one of the strands that comprise Apple Cider Vinegar. Viewers also meet Milla Blake (Alycia Debnam-Carey), a woman who promotes the power of food to fight her own cancer; Chanelle (Aisha Dee), Milla’s friend who helps Belle to grow her business; and Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), whose devastating cancer diagnosis changes the course of her and her husband’s lives.
“There was such a lot of story – real-life stories and wild and wonderful tangents,” says Strauss. “In real life, Belle did fake a seizure at her son’s fourth birthday that went on for 40 minutes. That wasn’t something I made up. I don’t know if I have the imagination to make that up. So there was definitely a bonkers aspect.
“Then the journalists’ book we adapted, what I love so much about it was they didn’t just chart her rise-and-fall story. They really looked at the whole tapestry of the wellness movement and they spoke to doctors, to other wellness influencers and to people who had followed Belle and who really did have cancer. There was such a lot of material that we were just picking through it, feeling rich with story.”
Strauss is not a heavy Instagram user, so she was “totally unaware” of the real Belle’s rise to fame on the social media platform. However, she did tune into her 2015 interview on Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes news programme, during which she admitted she lied about having terminal cancer.
“That was something that really went viral here and I thought she was really interesting. I love telling stories in the health, medicine and wellness space and the ethics around all of that. It’s something that’s just sort of deep in my DNA,” Strauss says. But it was only when she picked up a copy of Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano’s book The Woman Who Fooled the World that she began thinking more about wellness and the industry behind it, and how it might be perfect material for a television series.
Strauss optioned the book in 2018, “so it was a long time cooking,” she says. Writing started during the Covid pandemic, which made the series particularly timely. However, she then wondered whether there was a place for the show amid a wave of ‘scammer’ docuseries and dramas that have been produced in recent years.
“But what I kept coming back to was that it wasn’t just a scammer story. We did go off on different tangents and follow different characters and try to create a whole tapestry.”
Lucy proved to be a particularly key character – the series starts and ends with her – as Strauss wanted to focus on people who are “really hurting” and not those like Belle who already “get so much oxygen.”
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She also loved crafting the story of Milla, who was inspired by a number of different wellness influencers and serves as a mirror to Belle. “It was a real opportunity to show someone who Belle would love to be, and would love to have such a charmed life and all that love and beauty and support she had,” Strauss says, “but also to see someone like Milla, who still believed she gave herself cancer by not being perfect, and how that’s tied up in how hard we are on young women and body image and the blame we put on people.
“A bit of a guiding principle was that Belle was lying to everyone and Milla was lying herself, so it felt like a good juxtaposition and a good relationship to arc the story across.”
Belle’s admission comes close to the start of the series, as the show tells her story in two timelines – one following her rise and fall, and another seeing her try to repair her reputation. The story also explores her background, her difficult childhood and her relationship with her estranged mother (played by Essie Davis).
Strauss had no contact with the real Belle while making the show, and stresses that the version played by Dever is very different from the real person. “A lot of it is imagined, but it felt important to go to those origins really early in the series so that we know it, but it’s not the answer and it’s not the excuse and it’s not the reason at the end,” she says. “In our writers room, we would often be very sympathetic to Belle because she was this young mum who had a difficult childhood, and not terrific role models.
“She was just a kid from Melbourne who was lying about her age, pretending to be older, which is mind-boggling, so in a way you can empathise with some of that. But then the catastrophic consequences of what she was doing, not just faking her illness, but telling people how to beat their cancer, felt like we should never forget those people for very long. I liked the discipline of walking over to empathy and forgiveness and then stopping short.”
Strauss convened a few mini-writers rooms before partnering with Anya Beyersford (Fake) and Angela Betzien (Total Control) to write the six-part series, which is directed by Jeffrey Walker (Lambs of God). She describes Apple Cider Vinegar as “one of the best writers room experiences I’ve ever had.”
“Anya’s got a very wild brain and Angela’s got a very disciplined brain, and I’m probably somewhere in the middle,” she says. They spent four days brainstorming to map out the series, and then four days working on each episode. “So we were running fast but it was a time of lots of great ideas and it just felt like lovely,” Strauss adds.
Despite the non-linear timeline and the numerous protagonists, the writers always kept in mind a series of tentpoles to structure the series. Notably, they went against tradition by opting not to end the show with a court case, and instead saw Belle’s climax as a “dark night of the soul” – the night she’s fighting for her online life and losing her followers. “That is what our version of Belle really cares about, more that what a judge says. Just knowing what we wanted to say was how we guided our way through.”
Behind the scenes, Strauss reunited with director Walker, with whom she had first worked on Australian teen drama series H20: Just Add Water back when she was starting out in television.
“He was truly collaborative. There’s nothing worse than sitting on set and the director doesn’t want any notes, whereas Jeff and I did this thing to all the crew where, if you get a yes from Jeff, consider it a yes from Sam and vice versa. It was a great way to start,” she says.
Their shared vision for the show, which is produced by See-Saw and Picking Scabs, meant creating a series full of aspiration when it came to its Melbourne locations and the characters’ wardrobes, for example. However, the filming schedule was “wild.” Strauss admits she wrote “far too many” scenes, putting paid to Walker’s intentions to shoot the series in a formal way after he saw the scene count.
“And to me, that fluidity and never being stilted really helped any moments of comedy, helped performance, gave everyone a lot of room and it just meant we were able to move really fast,” she says. “We had over 100 locations, in Melbourne and then regional Victoria, and also Queensland. It wouldn’t be unusual to be doing two company moves a day. One day, Kaitlyn did 17 pages in an Australian accent – that was before lunch.”
US star Dever first came to Strauss’s attention after comedy roles in features such as Booksmart. But it was appearances in Netflix’s true crime drama Unbelievable and opioid crisis factual drama Dopesick that highlighted her “realness.” “It could break your heart,” Strauss says. “She’s so vulnerable in those shows, so it was interesting to think what it would be like to marry those two qualities [comedy and authenticity]. Most of all, it was that she was just fiercely intelligent and really passionate about doing this role.”
Yet the prospect of the American actor portraying an Australian made Netflix “nervous,” Strauss remembers. “The English do our accent a little bit better but Americans haven’t had a lot of success, and we just had to promise them that yes, she’ll be able to do it, not really knowing if she could.”
Dever was then partnered with accent coach Jenny Kent and set to work, with the encouragement of Walker behind her. “Jeff said to treat it like you’re doing a Marvel movie and you’re going to the gym,” Strauss says. “To her credit, she just threw herself into it. It was a masterclass to watch.”
If Apple Cider Vinegar has left a lasting impression on Strauss following its Netflix debut in February, it’s one of “rage” against the wellness industry that enabled Belle’s actions. “I always like there to be hope as well,” she says. “That is hopefully embodied in the character of Lucy.”
As for why Belle maintained the lies she told for so long, “I think it’s so simple. It’s just purely about love,” Strauss adds. “In her mind, that might just be attention. I don’t think it is money or fame. But fame is what a lot of people loving you is. A lot of us have maybe faked a headache to get out of dinner with friends; we haven’t faked brain cancer, but you can see if it’s coming from a place of not enough love and emptiness. You can see how social media feeds on that.”
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tagged in: Aisha Dee, Alycia Debnam-Carey, Apple Cider Vinegar, Kaitlyn Dever, Netflix, Picking Scabs, Samantha Strauss, See-Saw Films