Was Michaela Running a Cult? Julianne Moore, Milly Alcock Reveal the Truth (Exclusive)

[Warning: This post contains MAJOR spoilers from Season 1 of Sirens.]

In Sirens, Netflix’s new dark comedy, Devon (Meghann Fahy) sets out to bring her sister, Simone (Milly Alcock), home so she can have help caring for their ailing father, Bruce (Bill Camp), who’s been diagnosed with early onset dementia. She certainly didn’t expect to find Simone working as an assistant to billionaire Peter Kell’s (Kevin Bacon) wife, Michaela Kell (Julianne Moore), at the luxurious Cliff House.

After witnessing what was going on at the lavish estate — including guests dressed like “Easter eggs” and Michaela leading a meeting with a scepter — Devon quickly likened it to a “cult” and made it her mission to get her sister out of there. But was Michaela actually running a cult and keeping Simone under her spell?

“I always viewed the ‘cult’ kind of thread of the show as a red herring, you know?” Alcock tells TV Insider. “It’s not actually about a cult. It’s more a commentary on how class is a cult, how wellness is a cult, [and] how certain industries build this big following. I think that, by nature, you kind of get enamored by people with a lot of money because of the promise of what they can provide for you.”

Macall Polay/Netflix

The actress adds that people aren’t “bowing” to Michaela, but are simply infatuated by the fact that she has so much money and lives such a lush lifestyle.

Moore agrees, adding, “That’s definitely a red herring. I think what Alyssa Norwin, TV Insider Molly [Smith Metzler] is trying to say, in a kinetic way, is that lots of insular communities can feel rather cult-like. I think sometimes class, in and of itself, can feel cult-like, because it is hierarchical and it’s built to keep people out. I think this idea that there’s social mobility is something that can be a fallacy in our country, or in any country. So that’s what she’s talking about. She’s talking about that sense of something seeming so different, so other, that it almost seems like a cult.”

With her wealth, Michaela runs an aviary on her property and is passionate about animal activism, particularly with birds. While she wasn’t able to have kids of her own, she found a way to mother and nurture by dedicating her time to caring for these animals and helping them get to a point where they could be set free.

“I think that she wanted to do something important and I think that she wanted to help,” Moore says. “This idea that she could be involved in conservation and wildlife and it was something that was not going to be frivolous, that she was going to make a difference somewhere … and for someone who had been working as an attorney and had probably been achieving a lot in her life, it was hard to give that up, to give up any sense of doing work that mattered, so that’s what she was going to do. Also she wanted to help something where she felt help was needed. These birds, in a sense, had completely lost themselves in the same way that Michaela had lost herself.”

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