Meghann Fahy had a wacky part all her life. The White Lotus sprang into action to release it.

People underestimate melon, says actor Meghann Fahy. “I don’t think they give it a chance.” It’s a drizzly morning in April, two weeks before her 35th birthday, and Fahy is speaking in an Edible Arrangements outlet in Manhattan. In the first episode of Sirens, a Netflix limited series, Fahy’s character receives an arrangement, the Delicious Party, which weighs as much as a toddler.

“I dragged that arrangement around for weeks,” Fahy says. Now she has come to make her own, a gesture that feels a little like homage, a little like revenge.

Fahy knows what it’s like to be underestimated. She performed on Broadway as a teenager in 2009 and then barely worked until 2016, when she landed a role on The Bold Type, the rare series that makes a career in journalism look fun. She didn’t properly break out until 2022, in an Emmy-nominated turn in the second season of HBO’s The White Lotus.

This year, she has her first proper leads, as an imperiled single mother in the date-night thriller, Drop, and as a class-struggle chaos agent in Sirens. Created by Molly Smith Metzler (Maid), the series premieres on May 22.

In performance, Fahy typically offers bright emotional colours on the surface and darker ones below. Her mellow prettiness is complicated by a few hard edges, and she tends to leaven the sweetness of her roles with a streak of something wild, almost anarchic.

“She’s likeable and very winning and sunny, but she also has this mischievousness,” says White Lotus creator Mike White. “She has a bit of a naughty quality in this nice container.”

Even now, with two lead roles completed and more to come — starring opposite Rose Byrne in an upcoming Peacock series, The Good Daughter, and leading an upmarket film thriller, Banquet — Fahy doesn’t really feel she has arrived. She spent too long being overlooked for that. She claims not to mind it. “I like the underdog thing,” she says.

As a child in western Massachusetts, Fahy sang. She was paralysingly shy, and the hours leading up to a performance were excruciating. But on stage, she could give herself over to the song, a feeling she describes as addictive.

In high school, she told her mother that she wanted to pursue acting but she might need some help being brave about it. When her mother learned about an open call for Broadway singers, she took her daughter to New York. Although she panicked the night before, Fahy made it to the audition. She was cast as the understudy in the Broadway musical, Next to Normal, and spent her late teens backstage, hoping and not hoping that her friend and roommate, actor Jennifer Damiano, would have to call in sick.

Fahy eventually replaced Damiano as Natalie, the troubled daughter of a bipolar mother. Then the show closed, and Fahy’s community evaporated. She scrambled. She hostessed; she nannied; she auditioned, fruitlessly.

“I went through big phases of just being really, really low,” Fahy says. But she never considered abandoning acting. “Even when I was depressed and broke, I still knew I wanted to be here, and I wanted to keep going.”

In those years, she developed what she describes as a “go with the flow” attitude, cultivated partly out of inclination and mostly out of necessity, so she could find peace when she wasn’t working. She was helped by what she described as “a deep, deep, deep knowing” that her career would eventually resolve. And it did. In 2016, she was cast in the pilot for The Bold Type, an ensemble dramedy about three friends climbing the masthead of a Cosmopolitan-adjacent magazine.

If the show’s viewers were passionate, they were also relatively few, and Fahy could live her life more or less anonymously. That changed with The White Lotus.

In season two, Fahy played Daphne, the dippy-like-a-fox wife to Theo James’ Cameron. But she somehow brought heart and savvy to the part of an oblivious homemaker who can’t remember if she voted. Her Daphne was a realist, a hedonist and, like Fahy, a great hang.

White says that her work in front of the camera felt effortless, even mysterious. “She has the quality that every actor wants: You really like her, but she’s elusive,” he explains. “You want more.”

Fahy describes her months on The White Lotus as “nothing short of spectacular”. She loved the hotel, she loved the surrounding towns, and very quickly, she loved her co-star, English actor Leo Woodall, who plays an increasingly sweaty grifter.

“Can you imagine going and having the best experience in the world professionally and also falling in love?” she says.

They didn’t share any scenes, and Fahy hadn’t seen his previous work. Once the show aired, she finally saw him act.

“I was like, ‘Oh, my boyfriend’s really good’,” she says. They now share a home in Brooklyn.

Her Sirens character, Devon, is all vulnerability, even as she cracks wise and wears enough eyeliner for an entire emo band. When her father receives a diagnosis of early onset dementia and her sister (Milly Alcock) sends a compensatory fruit bouquet, Devon hauls said bouquet to a Nantucket-like island, where the sister is a live-in assistant for a steely philanthropist (Julianne Moore), to confront her.

Devon is a fish out of rarefied water. Fahy responded to that, partly because she has rarely felt like the perfect fit for any part — not quite the sexpot, not exactly the airhead, not precisely the girl next door. (She wasn’t even the first choice for Devon; other actors declined the role.) She admired Devon’s bravery, her tenacity, her willingness to put her few self-destructive behaviours on pause to better advocate for her sister.

You can see that in the first episode, when Devon, a black hole in a sea of pastels, clutching the ottoman-size arrangement of unrefrigerated fruit, debarks from the ferry. Her face conveys anger, fear, sorrow, resilience and curiosity.

“It’s hard to imagine that she was ever not the star that she is,” says Nicole Kassell, who directed the first two episodes of Sirens. It seems unlikely that anyone will underestimate Fahy much longer.

Sirens is on Netflix from May 22. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.