Interview: Alycia Debnam-Carey Discusses Women’s Health And Netflix’s ‘Apple Cider Vinegar’

Apple Cider Vinegar puts the online wellness community under a microscope. The show covers the trajectory of two completely different wellness influencers. One is Belle Gibson (Kaitlyn Dever) a disgraced influencer who faked her brain cancer diagnosis for insta-likes and love bombing from fans, and the other is Milla (Alycia Debnam-Carey), a young woman who is battling an aggressive form of cancer.

Milla amassed a huge following across social media when she decided to take matters into her own hands and claim bodily autonomy by looking for alternative methods to treat her cancer. She gained such notoriety online that Belle became infatuated and began stealing her survival story.

While Belle spirals more into her psychosis and gets trapped in her lies, Milla is in denial and running from confronting the disease that’s ravaging her body. Both Dever and Debnam-Carey are exceptional in their roles. Apple Cider Vinegar does a solid job of tackling the superficiality behind social media, the wellness community and navigating a devastating illness with the desire for autonomy.

Debnam-Carey had this to say about absorbing the early beginnings of social media at an impressionable age:

“It was an influential time for me. I was 16, and I remember the early days of the wellness influencer; it was so strangely imbued with the beauty standards for women that were suddenly projected onto young women at that time of social media, where we hadn’t quite gotten to what we now know is quite a polished and airbrushed version of the social media influencer. It was still without guardrails, so I feel like it was a lot of these young women who were also finding community but suddenly having a whole lot more influence and power…I was interested in joining this show to kind of show that world.”

Actress Alycia Debnam-Carey grounds Milla in her performance, and you can’t help but feel an enormous amount of empathy for Milla, who is partially based on the late Jessica Ainscough. During our chat, we spoke about the series and more. You can view the interview below.