“People underestimate melon,” the actress Meghann Fahy said. ”I don’t think they give it a chance.”

Fahy was speaking on a drizzly morning in April, two weeks before her 35th birthday, in an Edible Arrangements outlet on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. In the first episode of “Sirens,” a Netflix limited series, Fahey’s character receives an arrangement, the deluxe Party Dipped Fruit Delight, which weighs as much as a toddler.

“I dragged that arrangement around for weeks,” Fahy said. Now Fahy had come to make her own, a gesture that felt a little like homage, a little like revenge.

With some help from the store’s owner, she set about crafting a more modest assemblage. She combined cut pineapple and melon balls to form daisies, then speared honeydew and cantaloupe onto plastic skewers above a kale base. “And that’s how she stabbed herself,” she said, narrating the activity. “Sad.”

Meghann Fahy stars in “Sirens” as a protective sister with self-destructive tendencies and, in early scenes, an enormous fruit basket.Credit…Macall Polay/Netflix

Fahy knows what it’s like to be underestimated. She performed on Broadway as a teen in 2009 and then barely worked until 2016, when she landed a role on the go-getting Freeform show “The Bold Type,” the rare series that makes a career in journalism look fun. She didn’t properly break out until 2022, in an Emmy-nominated turn in the second season of HBO’s “The White Lotus.”

This year, she has her first proper leads, as an imperiled single mother in the date-night thriller “Drop,” which premiered last month, and as a class-struggle chaos agent in “Sirens.” Created by Molly Smith Metzler (“Maid”), the series premieres on May 22.