Billie Eilish is one of the biggest names in music, but her ambitions aren’t stopping with producing hit records.
The singer took on her debut acting role in the Prime Video series Swarm, which follows the life of an obsessive superfan of a world famous popstar as she falls deep into a parasocial relationship and murderous urges take over.
Swarm has been acclaimed for its subversive takes on fandoms, an important topic in a world where we see Swifties sending death threats and homophobic slurs to people who aren’t glowingly positive about the object of their obession (we’d hate to see what they’ve sent to people pointing out she’s a climate criminal…). It’s a wonderful blend of comedy and horror that we’ve seen before from Glover in Atlanta, although it definitely has an overall darker tint than his series about the unsettling and surreal experience of being black in America.
Many aspects of this role would have been undoubtedly and sadly familiar to Eilish, who as a woman in the public eye certainly has her own collection of dangerously obsessive fans. So, who did the pop star play in the series? Read on for Billie Eilish’s Swarm role, explained.
What is Swarm about?
Swarm follows Dre (the excellent Dominique Fishback), a young woman who is obsessed with a pop star named Ni’Jah (Nirine S. Brown), a Beyoncé -type figure with a rabid fanbase known as “the swarm.” The show takes place between 2016 and 2018, and focuses on the strange nature of fandoms as well as other unsettling aspects of American and online society.
Dre is clearly unstable, and as she falls deeper into her fandom becomes more obsessive and violent. On her odyssey she meets a number of strange folks and leaves a trail of bodies behind. At the heart of the narrative is her feelings towards Ni’Jah, and how they intertwine with her own messed up history and present.
Who does Billie Eilish play in Swarm?
Eilish appears in episode 4 of Swarm, where she plays the part of Eva. Eva is the leader of a cult that’s allegedly dedicated to women’s empowerment, and she senses that Dre is the right type of person to be programmed.
The episode begins with Dre, on her way to Bonaroo Festival to see her idol, being tailed by a racist cop. Eventually, a young white woman comes to her rescue and helps her to get away. Dre follows her savior to a compound that’s full of happy-seeming, friendly women, which appears to be led by the inviting Eva.
Eva pulls out all the usual cult grooming tactics that are also prevalent in the most extreme forms of fandom, from telling Dre that she’s “part of the tribe now” to enforcing a kind of uniformity of opinion and style. The charismatic leader also hosts what she calls training and healing sessions, into which Dre gets drawn after she goes on a hike with the group.
As Eva dives deeper into Dre’s mind, the latter reveals her murderous secrets, leading her to Eva attempting to blackmail and exert power over her. This only gets worse as Dre begins to question her surroundings, ironically bringing a level of scrutiny to Eva’s cult that she should have been training on her own obsession with Ni’Jah. The cult pushes to isolate her fully, only for Dre to manically run Eva over multiple times, while also killing another of the acolytes. She escapes, but at the cost of missing Ni’Jah’s Bonaroo gig.
Who did Billie Eilish base her Swarm character on?
There are a number of people and groups that Eilish might have based her character on, as Hollywood and the culture surrounding it is quite prone to that level of fanaticism. After all, Scientology exists. However, the most likely answer to this question is that the character was modelled on members of the NXIVM cult, led by Keith Raniere.
The cult, which included actress Allison Mack and involved group members literally branding themselves like cattle, was very much in the news at the time of filming, as Raniere was in the dock for a number of crimes. He was eventually sentenced to 120 years in prison and fined well over a million dollars for sex trafficking.
Show creator Janine Nabers confirmed this, telling THR: “There is a cult that existed in the world that was very prominent during that time.”
The show creator also added:
“And that is the kind of true-crime element to that episode. And I think that when people think of the idea of artists or celebrities, there is this idea of thinking about the cult of Taylor Swift, or the cult of the Beatles or whatever. What we were really interested in was just seeing someone who worships at the altar of ‘something,’ and (exploring) this idea of what is the cult of the mind.”
We’re sure Eilish, with her legions of fans, didn’t have to search too far to find the truth in that statement.