The year was 1978. A 20-year-old Michelle Pfeiffer has just moved to Hollywood to be an actress. It would be another four years before Pfeiffer got her first leading role in Grease 2. It was the year Michelle Pfeiffer accidentally joined a cult. We all make mistakes when we’re young.
Having been sitting on one of the strangest stories you’ll read all year for three decades, Pfeiffer is opened up about her time with a “very controlling” couple she fell in with shortly after moving to Los Angeles. The couple, which Pfeiffer described as “kind of personal trainers,” put Pfeiffer on an impossible diet and practiced breatharianism — the belief that human beings can live without food and water with the nourishment of sunlight. You might remember this summer a woman attempted to prove the theory but quit over mean internet comments, but also because she was quite literally starving herself to death.
“They were very controlling,” Pfeiffer says of the couple. “I wasn’t living with them but I was there a lot and they were always telling me I needed to come more. I had to pay for all the time I was there, so it was financially very draining.”
Pfeiffer credited her first husband, Peter Horton, with saving her from the cult. Horton had been cast in a film about the Moonies — followers of Rev. Sun Myung Moon — and Pfeiffer says she made the realization that she “was in one” as well while Horton was researching his role. “We were talking with an ex-Moonie and he was describing the psychological manipulation and I just clicked.”
What an insane story! Is Michelle Pfeiffer okay? What other truths is she hiding underneath that calm veneer? Did she take the Lindbergh baby? Did she shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die?
These days Pfeiffer is a vegan because, you know what they say, once in a cult, always in a cult.
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