It’s hard to describe Netflix’s limited series “Sirens” as a specific genre, which is exactly what attracted series star Meghann Fahy to the project. She plays Devon DeWitt, a woman hovering around the age of 30 and channeling the frustration of her derailed life into “saving” her sister, Simone (Milly Alcock), from the clutches of Simone’s micromanaging heiress boss. Untangling Simone from Michaela Kell (Julianne Moore) requires a weekend of sleuthing around the Kell beachfront estate, bringing both DeWitt and Kell family secrets to light in the process.
Simone manages to evade her sister’s attempts to drag her home to Buffalo to care for their neglectful, aging father for most of the premiere. However, the sisters lay their cards on the table in an emotionally fraught scene early in episode 2 after Devon sneaks back onto the Kell estate to forcibly remove her sister from the house.
“It’s a huge moment for the two characters. You haven’t seen them connect in a meaningful way until this point,” Fahy tells Variety of the scene that explains the sisters’ bond — and estrangement — for the first time in the series. “You don’t have a true vibe of how they feel about each other, how much they know about each other, and how they speak to each other. It’s a real dropped-in moment between the two of them.”
The scene begins with Devon sneaking across the Kell grounds in a wet suit she borrowed to swim to the massive house. The comedy continues as Devon explains she thinks Michaela is doing satanic animal sacrifices, but ventures into drama when Simone reveals she’s happier under Michaela’s overbearing standards than she ever was at home. The mood of the scene works like a pendulum as the women go from sisterly ribbing to poking each other’s deepest inner wounds and back again. It works so well on screen because the actors were allowed to perform the scene in its entirety, as if they were on stage.
“We were able to shoot the whole thing as one piece. We didn’t have to break the scene up into little chunks. It was really important to our director that we shoot it in a way that allowed Milly and me to take the scene from beginning to the end, like you would if it were a play,” Fahy explains, and credits series creator Molly Smith Metzler for the scene’s organic flow. “Molly is great at working a lot of different beats into something. She has hidden emotional turns that I love so much. When we got the opportunity to film it the way we did, we were able to navigate all of those turns in a way that felt really authentic.”
This first real confrontation as a whole reveals so much about Devon, Simone and their relationship. You learn so much about how these two women grew up and how they see each other now, but for Fahy there was one specific line in the over eight-page scene that encapsulates Devon’s experience throughout the entire series. Devon fights back when Simone accuses her of willfully staying stuck in their hometown.
“Devon says, ‘I did leave. I was the original leaver. I just came back because I’m a good sister.’ She’s being petty and fighting with her sister, but it’s also true,” Fahy explains. “When she says it, it makes her cry because she knows there’s something right about what Simone is saying. That’s so vulnerable to be seen by your little sister as anything less than a hero. That one line encompasses a lot of journey throughout the rest of the series.”
