There’s confidence, and then there’s confidence—the kind that helps a Silicon Valley wine mom serenely weather her husband’s flagrant infidelity. Or a lowly fashion assistant charge $500 worth of cocaine to her corporate card. Or a totally green 18-year-old nab a gig as a Broadway understudy after one of her very first auditions.

In real life, Meghann Fahy has done just one of these things. (Guess which!) But spend time with her and you’ll see she’s as self-assured as her characters. “Because I never really planned a career in this space, I never really had any idea of what I was hoping it would look like,” she says on a video call from London, where she’s taking a breather with her boyfriend and former White Lotus costar, Leo Woodall. “I just kind of go with the flow.”

Growing up in Massachusetts, Fahy dreamed of becoming a singer: if not the next Whitney Houston, maybe at least the next Avril Lavigne. After that pivotal tryout, though, she did contemplate a career as an actor. Fahy wasn’t cast in the show she was auditioning for—the ill-fated Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark—but she was impressive enough to earn a spot as a standby in Next to Normal before the musical transferred to Broadway and won a Pulitzer. Later she officially joined the principal cast. She performed eight shows a week while simultaneously chewing scenery on One Life to Live as the devious Hannah O’Connor, whose greatest hits included kidnapping, stalking, and more than one attempted homicide. “I was fully dressed in a cowgirl Halloween costume while forcing this woman to dig her own grave. And you know what? That is exactly how I would choose to be on a soap opera,” Fahy says. “I would never have wanted to be anything other than an absolute psycho.”

The role taught Fahy how to memorize reams of dialogue, and set her up for one-off gigs on shows like Law & Order: SVU. But mainstream success remained elusive until 2016, when she was cast on the Freeform dramedy The Bold Type. An endearingly earnest relic of the girlboss era, the show was never a huge hit, but it had a devoted coterie of fans largely thanks to Fahy’s work. Her credits had tended toward the dark and gravediggy. The Bold Type, as Fahy puts it, “basically just makes people happy. A show that has bright colors and pure female friendship was so nice and rare.” Even rarer is the bond she formed with costars Katie Stevens and Aisha Dee. “I talked to both of them yesterday,” says Fahy. “They’re fully sisters to me, a hundred percent.”

As Sutton on The Bold Type, Fahy proved she’s got impeccable timing, a refreshingly daffy energy, and a knack for conveying hidden layers. She showed off all three in the delectable second season of The White Lotus, playing the deceptively shallow Daphne Sullivan, who has a taste for cocktails and mind games. Creator Mike White nearly cast Fahy for the role that Alexandra Daddario played in the show’s first season, and later realized she’d be the perfect foil for Aubrey Plaza’s nervous, judgmental Harper. “You think she’s just a bimbo trophy wife, but she brought a depth that made it a more interesting dynamic,” he says from Thailand, where he’s deep in production on season three. “She’s just so likable that you’re like, ‘Yeah, I agree. Why follow the news? Why vote? I’m with her!’ ”

Fahy’s next big role finds her in another ensemble murder mystery, this one led by Nicole Kidman and based on a best-selling beach read: Elin Hilderbrand’s The Perfect Couple. The book introduces Fahy’s character, Merritt Monaco, as a “dangerous-looking brunette,” a description that makes the actor burst into laughter: “That’s so funny. What does that mean?” On the series, Merritt is a little more complicated. “She’s super fun and she dresses well, and she’s got all these followers on the internet,” Fahy says. “But through the course of the season, you get a peek at how sad and lonely she actually is.”

On some level, Fahy can probably relate. Given her lack of formal training, she says, it took her years to comfortably call herself an actor, “because I didn’t feel like I had a right to say that I was one.” After Next to Normal she suffered performance anxiety intense enough that she stepped away from live theater. Before the one-two punch of The Bold Type and The White Lotus, she struggled: “I was working multiple jobs on the side and not having health insurance and all of that stuff.”

Maybe surviving that experience is what gave Fahy the unbothered Daphne-esque aura that makes her so appealing. She’s unfazed by losing an Emmy to her White Lotus costar Jennifer Coolidge, or by watching her boyfriend fall in and out of love with somebody else on the hit Netflix romance One Day. (“I thought it was incredibly well done from top to bottom, and obviously the performances were my favorite part.”) She hasn’t had a permanent address since 2020, which she sees as a feature, not a bug.

As we speak, Fahy is about to return to New York for the dark comedy series Sirens, with Julianne Moore. After that, who knows? “I don’t attach myself too strongly to any idea because I’m so used to the plan changing,” she says. “The faster you can accept the circumstances of your life, the less you suffer.” And a little confidence definitely helps.

Hair, Tina Outen; makeup, Romy Soleimani; manicure, Megumi Yamamoto; set design, Matt Andersen. Produced on location by Farago Projects. Special thanks to NYC Second Chance Rescue. For details, go to vf.com/credits.