“In my mind, Belle is going through life, at least our version of Belle – I've never met the real Belle – she’s going through life with this hole inside, this overwhelming need for approval, that social media absolutely capitalizes on and she just keeps trying to feed the beast. She hasn't grown up with the healthiest of role models herself. She has learnt that being sick is a shortcut to being loved and to getting attention,” says Samantha Strauss, creator and showrunner for the Netflix limited series Apple Cider Vinegar, about understanding her main character’s disgraceful motivation to lie about having brain cancer.
Adapted from the book, The Woman Who Fooled the World, by Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, Apple Cider Vinegar chronicles the incredible and heartbreaking rise and fall of the real Belle Gibson (Kaitlin Dever), a notorious health and wellness “scamfluencer.”
Strauss talks about starting her young life in Australia as a ballet dancer before a terrible injury led her to discover TV writing. She also talks about how her previous TV show, The End, got the attention of Nicole Kidman, who championed her writing career. Strauss gushes about how she was inspired by Kidman’s, “Fierce intelligence, just exactly what you'd expect, and rigor. You know, she would be giving notes at the end of a really long day of filming. She wasn’t resting on her laurels at all. There's just such a generosity of spirit there and to think she’s helped other emerging Australian creatives is pretty special,” she says.
Strauss discusses the challenges of adapting a true story while the subject is still alive, tips and tricks for making the show feel immediate and seductive while mimicking the addictive nature of social media, and getting the primal relationship of mothers and daughters authentic on screen.
To hear more about Apple Cider Vinegar and Strauss’s advice for writers adapting true stories, listen to the podcast.