Michelle Pfeiffer Reveals Time in Breatharian Cult

Years before appearing on Hollywood's big screen, Michelle Pfeiffer was a young actress involved with a cult for a short time. In an interview with "The Sunday Telegraph's Stella" magazine, Pfeiffer revealed the riveting details of her time with a "very controlling" breatharian couple.

The three-time Academy Award nominee described leaving home at age 20 and relocating to Los Angeles, where she met the couple working as "kind of personal trainers."

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"They worked with weights and put people on diets. Their thing was vegetarianism," Pfeiffer said. "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."

"They believed that people in their highest state were breatharian," she added.

Breatharianism is the belief that food and water are unessential and a person can live on air and sunlight alone. Fittingly, Pfeiffer recalled being put on a diet "nobody can adhere to."

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However, shortly after Pfeiffer met her first husband, actor Peter Horton, he was cast for a new film about the Moonies, a nickname for the followers of Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church in South Korea. While assisting him with research "on this cult," she realized, "I was in one."

"We were talking with an ex-Moonie and he was describing the psychological manipulation and I just clicked," she said.

Pfeiffer, who is now a strict vegan, did not disclose how she severed ties with the cult.