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Apple Cider Vinegar doesn’t come with a warning label, but once the familiar sounds of Britney Spears’ “Toxic” start playing in the first episode, it’s clear this will be a poisonous tale. Then, as the limited series reaches its crescendo, another pop anthem closes out the final episode: Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire,” a chilling reminder of the bloodsucking predators who walk among us, selling promises of paradise.
The “bloodsucker” at the heart of Apple Cider Vinegar is the character Belle Gibson (Emmy nominee Kaitlyn Dever). But Belle doesn’t fear the sun like other vampires. Instead, in the drama’s closing montage, Belle basks in the sun, squatting next to a swimming pool, thriving compared to characters like Chanelle (Aisha Dee) and Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) who must attempt to rebuild their lives after falling for Belle’s lies about having cancer. Chanelle sacrificed time with her lifelong best friend Milla (It’s What’s Inside’s Alycia Debnam-Carey) to support Belle’s career — and now Milla has died from cancer. Meanwhile Lucy, another woman living with cancer, was influenced by Belle’s social media to the point of refusing traditional medical care for some time, gambling with her health.
Apple Cider Vinegar’s creator, Samantha Strauss, wanted the show’s ending to not only wrap up Belle’s journey, but emphasize the much wider effects of her deceptions. “The source material offered up terrific bones for a really interesting look at the rise and fall of a con woman,” Strauss tells Tudum. “But Apple Cider Vinegar is about more than that. This story just couldn’t exist without showing someone like Lucy — she is the real-world consequences.”
So what happens to Lucy in the final scenes of the limited series? And what’s really going on with Belle? Read on for Strauss and Dever’s answers to all your burning questions about Apple Cider Vinegar.
Apple Cider Vinegar is a true-ish story, based on a lie; its lead character, Belle Gibson, is inspired by a woman with the same name — an Australian influencer who claimed to have cured her terminal brain cancer through alternative therapies and nutrition. In 2015, investigative journalists Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano exposed Gibson’s claims about donating proceeds from her wellness app to charity as being unfounded, which led to the unraveling of Belle's story, including her cancer claims. She was eventually fined for engaging in misleading or deceptive conduct and unconscionable conduct in breach of Australian Consumer Law.
The real-life Gibson was not involved in the production of the series. Rather, Apple Cider Vinegar is a fictionalized drama series inspired by Donelly and Toscano’s book, “The Woman Who Fooled the World”.
When creating the character of Belle in Apple Cider Vinegar, Dever focused on the role’s “nuance,” she tells Tudum. “Our show’s Belle is a very complicated person. She is so good at being a chameleon, taking on totally different personas, and doing everything she can to get what she wants. She’s very ruthless and very determined.”
When building the world of Apple Cider Vinegar, Strauss says she was particularly interested in “looking at a whole tapestry of people across the wellness and medical spaces.” That’s why Belle is only one of the main characters throughout the limited series. The drama also follows Milla, a twentysomething woman who is trying to beat cancer through wellness practices, and Lucy, who attempts to embrace Belle’s teachings after a breast cancer diagnosis, much to the dismay of her journalist husband Justin (Mark Coles Smith).
Some characters are inspired by real people. Others are combinations of people in the orbit of this story. And some were created by the Apple Cider Vinegar team for the series.
“I’d say Milla is a portrait of influencers at the time,” Strauss says. “She’s someone who is desperately trying to save her own life and becomes blind to the truth because of it.”
Dever is proud of Apple Cider Vinegar’s wide scope on a vast community. “We’re really showing all kinds of different points of view in this story,” the actor says. “The show really does speak on hope and ideas that wellness can bring to people.”
Belle begins to tell people she has cancer in Episode 1, when she is pregnant with her son. For the rest of the series, she is repeatedly asked if that claim is true (including during her Episode 6 tell-all TV interview). She never admits that it is not. However, at the end of Episode 1, you can see a medical record that says her brain scan is “normal” and there are “no abnormalities detected.”
However, there is some context given as to why there’s such a chasm between the truth and Belle’s representation of her own health. In Episode 4, Belle visits Dr. Phil (Callan Mulvey), an alleged medical professional who works out of a warehouse. Dr. Phil and Belle seem to have a long history together, since he mentions her mother and Belle’s childhood. When he hooks Belle up to a machine and tells her there’s a “cluster” somewhere in her body and “DNA damage” in her liver and uses the word “tumor,” Belle bursts into tears.
“That was such a special sequence and really felt like a key and a heart of the show,” Strauss says. “Belle is young, quite lonely, and overwhelmed.”
In the series, Belle lies about having malignant brain cancer on a pregnancy message board. She then attempts to strike up a friendship with Milla through social media around their alleged shared cancer diagnosis. Eventually, Belle launches The Whole Pantry app around the message that “whole” eating cured her terminal cancer. She encourages others to follow in her footsteps. The success of The Whole Pantry catapults Belle — and her cancer diagnosis — to fame. Throughout the show, we see how some people latch onto her story and attempt to implement it into their own lives, denying medical intervention in favor of organic produce.
Strauss and Dever agree that Belle got so used to telling the story of her cancer, she forgot it wasn’t true. “You tell a lie enough times, you perhaps believe it,” Strauss says. “It becomes your own truth. We probably do that all the time, every day.”
Dever also believes that Belle’s traumatic youth, which is repeatedly nodded toward throughout Apple Cider Vinegar, is the source of her deceptions. In the series we learn that the character of Belle ran away from home at 12 and still has a very tense relationship with her neglectful mother, Natalie (Essie Davis), who also seems prone to lying.
“I do think that a lot of what led her to lie is based solely on her childhood and her upbringing,” Dever says. “So, I don’t know if our show’s Belle necessarily believed that she was a scammer. She did think that she was helping people.”
Milla is introduced as a bubbly young woman with her whole life in front of her. She’s partying in her new home city of Sydney and enjoying her first journalism job. Then Milla is diagnosed with pleomorphic sarcoma and told the only way to cure the cancer in her arm is by amputation. She disagrees, and turns to alternative wellness — like juicing and coffee enemas — to fight her disease.
For a while, Milla’s choices seem to work. She creates a successful brand and appears quite healthy, considering the circumstances. But, in Episode 3, her mother Tamara (Susie Porter) is diagnosed with a different type of cancer. Desperate to be a good mom, Tamara tries to follow the same protocols she allowed her daughter to do. In Episode 4, Tamara dies.
By Episode 5, Milla recognizes how sick she has become. Five years after her initial diagnosis, she tries to get traditional medical treatment which is no longer available as it’s too late. Milla is told she has about three months to live. Later in the episode, Chanelle and Milla share an emotional farewell conversation on a beach. The finale features Milla’s funeral.
Series creator Strauss is blown away by Debnam-Carey’s portrayal of Milla. “What Alycia talks so beautifully about is how difficult it is to be a young woman who feels like she’s made herself sick by not being perfect,” the writer says. “Milla feels that overwhelming need to be perfect — that the only way to be loved as a young woman is to be perfect.”
Lucy and Justin are the last people we see in Apple Cider Vinegar’s ending montage. “That was so important to me,” Strauss says about this decision. “At that point it felt like, ‘Belle, enough of you.’ I wanted to get back to the real people her story affected.”
The last time we see Lucy (who leaned away from traditional medicine after following Belle) and Justin (who wanted his wife to seek traditional medical treatment for her cancer), they’ve reached a compromise. Yes, Lucy gets chemotherapy 4000 and undergoes surgery for her breast cancer. But she and Justin also do yoga and cold plunges as a couple.
“Lucy finds her own way through,” Strauss says. “When you think about the reason that couples want to stay alive, it’s to love each other. So it felt good to end the series in love.”
In Episode 4, Belle meets Fiona (Edwina Wren), the mother of a cancer-stricken 8-year-old named Hunter (Christian Fordham). Belle soon begins fundraising for Hunter on her personal platforms and in collaboration with her business. In Episode 6, Justin and fellow investigative journalist Sean (Richard Davies) inquire whether any of the donations Belle has received were actually given to charities. Once the reporters find out they have not, their published revelation pushes commentators and followers to question if anything Belle said is true — including her cancer diagnosis.
Alone in a hotel room, Belle starts to crack under scrutiny. She hallucinates a version of Milla, who tries to help her defend her fraudulent persona. “She was almost fighting for her life even though she doesn’t have cancer and she’s not dying,” Dever says. “She’s just grasping at straws just to hold all of this together. That is the most broken we’ve seen her.”
The negative coverage by newspaper The Age pushes Belle to move to Los Angeles with her partner Clive (Ashley Zukerman) and her son.
Belle spends her time in LA trying to rehabilitate her image. Her greatest triumph is an interview with Australian 60 Minutes that also nets her AU$75,000 (roughly $47,000). When the host (Sibylla Budd) asks Belle if she has cancer, Belle avoids giving a straight answer, saying, “I really, really hope not.”
Strauss says Apple Cider Vinegar’s Belle is being honest — at least from her perspective. “She’s saying, ‘I really hope I can be well.’ ” Strauss explains. “Does Belle think she’s a scammer? I think everyone is the hero of their own story. No one sees themselves as the bad guy.”
After the interview, Belle joins her son and Clive by the swimming pool. Strauss and Dever both believe Belle is choosing to be better for her family at the end of Apple Cider Vinegar. “She wants to give love to her son. At her core, Belle really does want to be a good mom. That’s what I was thinking about in that moment,” Dever says. “That scene is really twisted. It’s dark, heartbreaking, sad — it’s so many emotions wrapped up into one. To end the series in that way is really, really powerful.”
Relive Belle’s entire saga right now by streaming the series on Netflix. And keep coming back to Tudum for even more intel on Apple Cider Vinegar.