Alycia Debnam-Carey has always had a profound love of the arts. Though she’d been sharpening her acting skills since the age of 8 and landed roles in short films in Australia as a teen, Debnam-Carey found herself drawn to the “consistency and security” of music, so much so that the classical percussionist and jazz drummer nearly auditioned for the Sydney Conservatorium of Music ahead of her high school graduation.

“I was in my tutoring, getting ready for all the pieces that we were going to play and sitting there suddenly having the audition scheduled and going, ‘Actually, I don’t think I want to do this,’ ” recalls Debnam-Carey, 31. “I remember being like, ‘I’ve actually booked a flight to Hollywood’ — which was so chaotic — but I just inherently knew that acting was always something that I wanted to be doing.”

Debnam-Carey’s latest role in Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar has taken her back to that time in her life in an unexpected way. The limited series follows two young women who use their social media platforms to promote alternative medicine: Belle Gibson (Kaitlyn Dever), a real-life fraudster who falsely touts a brain cancer diagnosis that she claims to have managed through diet and natural medicine; and Milla Blake (Debnam-Carey), loosely based on magazine editor Jessica Ainscough, who opts for alternative therapies over professional medical recommendations when she’s diagnosed with a rare cancer. Ainscough died in 2015 at age 29, just six months after she switched to alternative treatments.

“I was 17 when Instagram really started popping off, and I remember absorbing a lot of these wellness influencers and that weird, interesting balance between aspirational but also a little bit damaging in terms of body image,” says Debnam-Carey. “There were no guardrails, so I was very much coming into myself as a person around that age and very easily influenced by it, as a lot of my peers were.”

Belle and Milla have drastically different motivations for their actions, the former manipulating her audience to achieve notoriety, the latter simply desiring a holistic means to take control of her health. “There’s a kind of naivete that we see in Milla but also a desperation and a hope that even still right now we’re seeing,” says Debnam-Carey. “A great comparison is what you’re seeing in the White House. Here’s this MAHA [Make America Healthy Again] movement, and we like to think, ‘Oh, maybe these things are just relegated to social media.’ No, it’s happening in the most powerful house, and there’s such distrust around these subjects and so much information. It’s so hard to discern anything now.”

Debnam-Carey personally knows about the power of influence, having amassed a large fan base following her breakout role as Lexa in the CW postapocalyptic sci-fi drama The 100, which she landed just three years after coming to the States. “It was a lucky time,” she says of being scouted by managers before she made that decision to board a plane to L.A. “Americans really loved Australians then.”

They loved Debnam-Carey even more when she starred as Alicia Clark on AMC’s Fear of the Walking Dead from 2015 to 2023. “Doing two genre cult shows back-to-back, that was a real crash course in fandom and how passionate and intense those genre shows can be,” she says. “I remember my first time going to Comic-Con and being in shock by everything that was going on — it just kept getting bigger and bigger.”

Such is true for Debnam-Carey’s career, as it was recently announced she’ll star in Legendary’s forthcoming untitled Monsterverse movie, reuniting with Dever for the franchise film. “It’s so rare that you get to work with someone again. We all say it — ‘I hope we work together again’ — but chances are you don’t. So to actually do it so closely after Apple Cider is really fun,” says Debnam-Carey. “It’s also so fun to be a part of a movie-movie, a big popcorn movie,” she adds. “I’ve always wanted to do something like that on a big screen.”

This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.