Michelle Pfeiffer reveals odd cult experience as a young actress

Michelle Pfeiffer revealed an interesting tidbit over the weekend: She was once unwittingly a member of a cult.

Pfeiffer told the Daily Telegraph’s Sunday magazine, Stella, that as an up-and-coming actress, around age 20, she’d fallen in with a Los Angeles couple who acted as “kind of personal trainers” and were “very controlling.”

Now a strict vegan, Pfeiffer was put on a diet by the unnamed couple, who also worked with weight training. “Their thing was vegetarianism,” she said (via the Daily Telegraph), and a diet that “nobody can adhere to.”

Turns out their thing was also breatharianism, a belief that when a human being is in his or her highest state, it’s possible to exist only on sunlight.

That’s right, no food or water. Just sunlight. Quite a high state indeed.

They also charged her for time spent with them, and urged her to spend more and more time in their company, she said, noting that it became a financial burden.

The actress, whose newest film “The Family” hit U.S. theaters in September but doesn’t open in Great Britain until the Friday before Thanksgiving, said that her rescue from the situation came when she met Peter Horton, who became her first husband.

Horton at the time was researching for a role in a film about the followers of the Rev. Sun-myung Moon’s Unification Church, and as Pfeiffer helped him look into the nature of cults, she realized, “I was in one.”

And that was the end of that.

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