Talk about a dangerous liaison.
Actress Michelle Pfeiffer revealed in an interview with Britain’s The Telegraph that she was part of a “cult” that believed humans could survive without food or water back when she first arrived in Hollywood.
Pfeiffer, now 55, says her ordeal began when she first arrived in Hollywood as an impressionable twenty-year-old actress and fell in with a couple who espoused a “breatharianism” philosophy.
“They worked with weights and put people on diets. Their thing was vegetarianism,” she told The Telegraph’s Stella Magazine while promoting her latest film, The Family.
“They were very controlling. 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.”
She adds that she didn’t realize that she was in a damaging cult-like relationship until years later after she met her first husband, actor Peter Horton.
Horton, who she divorced in 1988, had been cast in a movie about Rev. Moon Sun-myung’s Unification Church and his research into the Moonies led her to see parallels in her own situation, Pfeiffer said.
She declined to reveal the identity of the Los Angeles-based couple, except that they were personal trainers.
“We were talking with an ex-Moonie and he was describing the psychological manipulation and I just clicked,” Pfeiffer told the Telegraph.
