Belle Gibson in Apple Cider Vinegar

Playing a real person whose lie became an industry — the 2025 role that showed Dever's appetite for uncomfortable true stories.

In Netflix's Apple Cider Vinegar (2025), Dever plays Belle Gibson, the real-life Australian wellness influencer who built a following — and a business — on the claim that she had healed terminal cancer through diet and natural therapies, a story that unravelled when the claims were exposed as false. It is the third time in her career she has anchored a fact-based story about institutional and personal failure, after Unbelievable and Dopesick — and the first time the subject is the person doing the deceiving rather than the person failed by the system.

Why the role fits her

Gibson is a harder sell than Dever's earlier real-life subjects: the audience has to understand how someone becomes convincing enough to build an empire on a falsehood, without the performance turning into caricature. Dever plays her as a person first and a cautionary tale second — the same instinct that made Marie Adler and Betsy Mallum work, pointed in the opposite moral direction. Released in the same year as her Last of Us debut, it made 2025 the year Dever stopped being a promising actress and became a headliner in two completely different registers.