The Women of Forbidden Fruits Are Rewriting the Gospel of Girlhood Leave a comment
“Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her, we all die.”
The first time a woman was blamed for everything, it was biblical.
Long before tabloids crowned their weekly villains and comment sections sharpened their knives, there was Eve—framed as the origin of ruin. It’s been more than 2000 years since that line, referencing the fall in the book of Genesis, was etched into scripture and exactly zero days since women stopped being told they are each other’s downfall. The narrative might evolve, but the accusation that women are each other’s undoing sticks. You see tabloid headlines, Reddit snark posts, and whispers about who did what to get to the top.
Evil doesn’t die. It simply reinvents itself. Misogyny has a remarkable talent for sticking around.
Enter Forbidden Fruits, the upcoming indie horror-dramedy from director Meredith Alloway that takes that ancient blame game and twists it into something deliciously deranged. The film, premiering March 27, trades the Garden of Eden for a suburban Texas mall and swaps Eve for a cult of witchy retail employees on the verge of a quiet mental breakdown. Among the creative forces behind it is producer Diablo Cody, who is best known for the teen horror-comedy Jennifer’s Body. Starring Lili Reinhart, Lola Tung, Victoria Pedretti, and Alexandra Shipp, Forbidden Fruits is a dark take that sinks its teeth into the complicated nature of female dynamics.
The film—adapted from Lily Houghton‘s 2023 stage play inspired by the same opening biblical verse—has all the hallmarks of a deeply rotted cult classic in the making: campy outfits, a questionable wig budget, gallons of syrupy fake blood that rivals that of a Final Destination film, and a star-studded cast that makes you question how they got all of these actors in the same room.
“From the beginning, cowriter Lily Houghton and I knew the key was finding actors who could balance the satire and the emotional honesty of the film,” explains Alloway. Over the course of several weeks, Alloway and Houghton met with each of the actors on Zoom before they were officially cast, tapping into their inner psyche. “Watching all of them together in rehearsal for the first time was magnificent—it was musical. They were playing off each other in real time, understanding how to balance their different energies as characters,” Alloway continues. It certainly helps that the film was shot exclusively from the hours of 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., adding to the delirious state of the actors playing delirious characters. It’s peak trauma bonding at its finest.
The chemistry is crucial. Frankly, it’s what sucks you in as a viewer when watching Forbidden Fruits for the first time. Beneath the glittery dresses, food court pretzels, and fluorescent store lighting, Forbidden Fruits isn’t really about witchcraft or the occult. It’s about the tension that exists in hierarchy. The women’s underground cult promises empowerment, but its currency is proximity. To be anointed (or, in the case of the film, bullied) is to be adored. To be adored is to be envied, and in this world, envy puts you in a dangerous position—fast.
Take, for example, Apple (played by Reinhart) the fierce lesbian ringleader who drives the narrative forward. She commands the basement cult with a mix of icy-cold stares and intimidation. Her presence is a gravitational force that pulls the other women into orbit. Reinhart’s Apple isn’t a stereotypical larger-than-life cartoon villain. She’s magnetic and manipulative, but by the finale, she feels deeply broken and human.
That duality has become something of a signature for Reinhart as an actor. First catapulted into the cultural zeitgeist as Betty Cooper on The CW’s Riverdale, Reinhart proved early on that she could elevate archetype into complexity. Betty could have easily remained the wholesome girl next door, but in Reinhart’s hands, she unraveled—darkness creeping in around the edges, trauma and obsession bubbling beneath her perfect ponytail.
Even then, Reinhart demonstrated a fascination with fractured femininity: women who are both soft and sharp, controlled and chaotic. Apple feels like a natural, if more feral, evolution of that interest.
“I looked at her like a really troubled, lost woman who’s desperate for sisterhood and control. She’s definitely a bitch, but she’s a bitch that you want to love you,” Reinhart explains. She’s sitting across from me on-screen deeply snuggled in an oversize hoodie that is likely a post–New York Fashion Week uniform for the actor, who’s been zipping around Manhattan attending shows and beginning the press tour for Forbidden Fruits. “It’s sort of the Regina George of it all. It’s like, ‘Wow, she’s so mean. Can she be mean to me?'” she adds.
There’s deep-rooted empathy for Apple, though, that practically radiates off Reinhart’s end of the screen when we meet over Zoom to discuss the film. Reinhart read the script in 2023—two years before production began—and became attached to the project, namely Apple. “I got on Zoom with Meredith and Lily, and we just vibed for an hour,” Reinhart recalls. “I just went in with a really strong vision and was like, ‘Oh, I’m Apple, by the way.'”
It’s a vision that took shape long before cameras rolled in Toronto, and Reinhart dove headfirst into Apple’s world. There were marathon Preacher’s Daughter listening sessions (“Apple feels very Ethel Cain to me,” she confesses) and a strict rule about nails. She wore just two short ones because Apple needed to look lesbian without overtly announcing it. There were also hours of movement lessons with a dedicated coach who experiments in animal mannerisms. Reinhart settled on a lion, a nod to her character’s sensual yet destructive nature.
The most blatant character study, though, comes in the form of a simple, cheeky baby tee Apple wears in the climax of the film post–mental breakdown. Costume designer Sarah Millman inserted the infamous verse “Of the woman came the beginning of sin…”—a clear nod to Apple’s character arc in the film and the original title of the play Forbidden Fruits is based on. Throughout the story, she’s often blaming misfortune on men and the patriarchy, but is it just projection? Does she actually believe that women are to blame for all that’s wrong in the world? Reinhart doesn’t skip a beat when I inquire further: “If women are the origin of sin, then they must be pretty fucking powerful, yeah?”
Apple, and Reinhart by extension, has a fascination with powerful, notorious women throughout history. You know, the ones often beheaded or burned at the stake. Just casual, girly things. “Marie Antoinette, Anne Boleyn, Joan of Arc—Apple thinks those women were clearly the most intelligent women and doing something right. I think she idolizes that,” Reinhart admits. It’s not hard to see why. For the majority of the film, Apple has her other fruits (aptly named Fig, Cherry, and Pumpkin) squarely under her manicured fingers. “Being a woman is so powerful, and throughout the movie, you see all of the women come into their own power at some point or another,” she says.
How do the women of Forbidden Fruits define their own path, though? For Tung, it’s all about context. It’s not lost on the actress that the film is set in the present day, where oppression against women—the real horror, not just jump scares and bloody gore—is the undercurrent that runs throughout some of the scenes.
“Even if it wasn’t at the forefront of the movie, the conversations we’re having on set play into Forbidden Fruits. Even though the exact way in which we’re telling this story is new, there’s also so many films that have paved the way,” Tung tells me, nodding to the greats in the film’s cinematic universe: Heathers, Jennifer’s Body, The Craft, and, of course, Mean Girls. Notably, the cast filmed in the same Toronto mall that Lindsay Lohan and the Mean Girls cast filmed iconic scenes from the 2004 comedy. “We’re haunted by the friendly ghosts of our past, in the best way,” Tung jokes.
The through line of teen girls behaving badly and female friendships spiraling into something feral hangs over Forbidden Fruits, but for Tung, stepping into that canon marks a distinct tonal pivot from the role that made her a household name.
The 23-year-old is fresh off a generational run. If you’re living under a rock or simply haven’t opened TikTok in the past six months, let me catch you up to speed. Tung recently concluded her work on the television series that gave her her first big break—Amazon Prime’s The Summer I Turned Pretty. (A movie is now in the works.) For three seasons, tweens and TikTok-savvy mothers alike watched a coastal New England love triangle form on-screen between Isabella “Belly” Conklin and brothers Conrad and Jeremiah Fisher.
While Belly cried in debutante gowns, Tung’s character in Forbidden Fruits, Pumpkin, plots in basements. In the film, Pumpkin takes on the role of a quiet, calculated observer who begins to slowly drive a wedge between the other women of the cult.
The tonal whiplash isn’t lost on Tung, and it’s precisely why she does what she does. “From the get-go, I wanted to do completely different things. That’s the fun in being an actor,” Tung says. “Forbidden Fruits was such a great thing to do after The Summer I Turned Pretty because it’s a totally different world. It is so nice to be able to play roles that push you in a way you haven’t been pushed before. That feeling is kind of addicting.”
Tung was, by far, the youngest of the main ensemble on set and often had deep, introspective conversations with Reinhart about growing up in front of a global audience who feels entitled to every aspect of your life. It’s a challenge she’s had to navigate post–The Summer I Turned Pretty knowing that, at the end of the day, she’s trying to be her own person while being a part of a generation that deeply craves connection with each other in the midst of a loneliness epidemic.
“Human beings crave a sense of being a part of a pack or belonging, and now with technology and with social media, there’s a false sense of thinking everyone is part of your family and that you know them, but you don’t,” Tung explains. Forbidden Fruits is, at its core, a story about young women desperate to be chosen and initiated into something bigger than themselves. The inverse is true in her personal life. Fans don’t just watch anymore. They theorize, they ship, they comment, and they demand. The hunger for access mirrors the film’s cult-like intimacy in ways that feel almost on the nose.
If Tung’s Pumpkin represents the outsider who slowly finds her way into the deranged world of the fruits, Pedretti’s character is the one who’s most deeply devoted to keeping up the fantasy that these women are the best of friends. Pedretti plays Cherry, a bubbly, sensual, risk-taking blonde who holds on to trauma that deeply unravels her. In any other universe, the cowboy hats, Bayonetta glasses, and pink paillette Daisy Dukes Pedretti wears throughout the film might make you think Cherry is another ditzy, hypersexualized female archetype. In reality, she’s a layered, complex example of what it means to be a woman today.
“The beautiful thing that Cherry has to offer in her decoration of herself has so much merit, yet it’s totally diminished by the fact that she doesn’t have much confidence. She wants the validation of her sisters and her community,” Pedretti, dialing in from a production in New Zealand, explains.
The actor speaks deliberately and slowly. Pedretti tells me she turned 30 while on set of Forbidden Fruits, which could be another layer to the deep emotional connection she feels toward a younger, perhaps more emotionally insecure Cherry. You can feel her deep reverence for her character despite being nothing like her in real life. She sees Cherry almost as a cautionary tale. “There’s a moment in which Alexandra Shipp, who plays Fig, says that Cherry becomes a lipstick shell of herself. She’s put so much attention into the way she presents herself and this loyalty to Apple that she’s lost sense of who she is,” she says.
Pedretti, who garnered critical acclaim for her roles as Love Quinn in Netflix‘s thriller You and Nell Crain in The Haunting of Hill House, knows a thing or two about playing an emotionally bruised character. Unlike her past performances, though, Cherry felt different—almost too elusive to parse through at times. The actor spent hours dissecting biographies and documentaries chronicling the lives of tragic women, people like Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and Anna Nicole Smith.
Just like Cherry, Pedretti suggests, these women did what was expected of them in order to protect their truest selves from the gaze of the outside world. “Cherry has this ideal of wanting to perform this perfect idea of her best self because it keeps her safe,” Pedretti adds. “I’m really grateful to live in this time where our existence and safety is not solely dependent on the validation of men.”
Rather than viewing Forbidden Fruits as a straightforward feminist psychoanalysis of female friendship, Pedretti sees it as something more uncomfortable—a story about the ways patriarchy infiltrates even our attempts at solidarity. “When we move throughout the world as women, we’re often so categorized before we’re even allowed to be people, and within that process, we’re objectified,” she notes. “It’s incredible how, in our attempts to support one another, we can dehumanize ourselves. It feels like an impossible thing to make our way out of.”
For Pedretti, the film interrogates a quieter pressure: the expectation that womanhood alone should guarantee intimacy, that shared lived experience should automatically translate into trust, loyalty, and devotion. Cherry clings to Apple and the other fruits not just out of desire but also out of obligation and a belief that this is what sisterhood is supposed to look like. The tragedy, Pedretti says, is that solidarity built on expectation rather than choice can curdle into something just as suffocating as the system it’s meant to resist.
It’s an idea that Shipp, who plays Fig, understands intimately. Over the past decade, Shipp has built a career on playing women navigating power structures much larger than themselves, from teenage mutants in X-Men to pop culture icons in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. She brings a grounded, emotional intelligence to characters that could easily tip into stereotype. She has a way of locating the humanity inside spectacle, which makes her portrayal of Fig a compelling presence in Forbidden Fruits.
Though the women on-screen are unraveling—gaslighting each other in mall basements and weaponizing sisterhood—the atmosphere behind the scenes was anything but chaotic. Shipp describes a set defined by mutual respect and creative rigor, where each actor arrived prepared to go toe-to-toe.
“It was really fun to play characters that are so far from who we all are as individual women,” she gushes, looking back on the experience of working with Reinhart, Tung, and Pedretti. “I knew right away, being surrounded by this incredible ensemble, that I had to step my game up.”
That competitive generosity, each woman pushing the other to dig deeper, bleeds into Forbidden Fruits itself. Despite being an original member of the mall coven, Fig feels like an outsider within the confines of the system. She’s Black, a bit goth, and refreshingly self-aware in a group that thrives on delusion. Shipp plays her with a quiet sharpness, like someone constantly calculating the temperature of the room. But at the end of the day, she admits, Fig goes along with the hexes, the drama, and the chaos largely out of proximity. She’s there, so she stays.
“I had conversations with Meredith [Alloway] because Fig is obviously a college-educated, strong, willpowered individual. She can’t just be in this world because of the store discount she gets from working at the mall,” Shipp says, dialing in from her home in Los Angeles. “She eventually snaps because, at the end of the day, we can only take so much shit from someone. Fig came to the store for the community. Someone who wants to make friends will do some really fucked-up shit.”
For Shipp, that contradiction is the point. Fig isn’t naïve—she’s lonely. And loneliness in Forbidden Fruits is just as dangerous as devotion. “It’s like trauma bonding,” she jokes, referencing the similarities between the dynamic between the women in Forbidden Fruits and her own experience of working at a retail store in her pre-acting days. “We don’t get to choose who we’re around when we’re working retail, sure, but we can both hate the boss. We can both hate the long hours.”
It’s a flippant comparison, but it’s a valid one. Shared dissatisfaction can feel like intimacy. Mutual resentment can masquerade as alignment. In the fluorescent purgatory of a retail job—or the dimly lit back room of a cultish girl gang operating in the basement—solidarity often begins with a common enemy. The problem, Fig eventually realizes, is that bonding over what you hate isn’t the same thing as building something you love. “In particular for Fig, it was really important for me to showcase that she just wanted friends, low-key. There’s something so sweet and innocent about that,” Shipp admits. “She was accepted and appreciated by the fruits. It’s a really intoxicating feeling, but it doesn’t mean you have to be around all of these bad people, and she comes to find that out.”
Although each of the women come to realize the toxic nature of their friend group, Fig is the first to snap. It’s a deliberate choice, acting as the first domino in a set to fall over and cause the fracturing of the larger ensemble. In that way, Fig is the realest character. The result is a fight during a tornado lockdown that drives the women farther apart than ever. Everyone is in it to save their own lives. The illusion of girlhood—a glossy means of salvation—collapses in on itself at the end.
From Eve to the mall basement, the temptation’s always been the same: Pit the women against each other. You call it jealousy, call it hysteria, or call it sin, but ultimately, it isn’t that simple. The danger that Forbidden Fruits puts on full display isn’t about female power. It’s what happens when that power gets warped, when belonging becomes transactional, and when sisterhood becomes performance. The film grants its women the freedom to be messy, manipulative, hedonistic, horny, wrathful, and, most importantly, fully in command of their own stories.
In their made-up Garden of Eden, no serpent is required. There’s no forbidden apple. It’s just a group of women trying—messily, imperfectly, and often destructively—to carve out space for themselves in a world that still insists on defining them first.
Two thousand years later, the accusation about whether women were the origin of sin lingers, but Forbidden Fruits dares to ask a different question. What if women were never the cause of it and are simply the most convenient scapegoats?
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Photographer and Super 8 Director: Emman Montalvan
Stylist: Lauren Eggertsen
Hairstylist for Lili Reinhart: Ericka Verrett
Hairstylist for Lola Tung: Dana Boyer
Hairstylist for Victoria Pedretti: Chris Farmer
Hairstylist for Alexandra Shipp: Miles Jeffries
Makeup Artist for Lili Reinhart: Cedric Jolivet
Makeup Artist for Lola Tung: Misha Shahzada
Makeup Artist for Victoria Pedretti: Shelby Smith
Makeup Artist for Alexandra Shipp: Dana Delaney
Manicurist for Lili Reinhart: Erin Leigh Moffett
Manicurist for Lola Tung: Thuy Nguyen
Manicurist for Victoria Pedretti: Stephanie Stone
Manicurist for Alexandra Shipp: Queenie Nguyen
Creative Director: Alexa Wiley
Set Designer: Isaac Aaron
Entertainment Director: Jessica Baker
Producer: Lindsay Ferro
DP: Sam Miron
Producer: Kellie Scott
(Image credit: Future)
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