“I have a lot of creepy old men DM’ing me,” Sam Nivola tells me over the phone from his East Village apartment. The third season of The White Lotus is to blame for that. The 21-year-old Nivola plays Lochlan Ratliff, a sheepish high school senior on vacation in Thailand with his old money North Carolina family.
The most recent installment of the series will probably not help Nivola’s creepy-old-men problem. Episode six reveals that Lachlan’s wild night out with older brother Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and hotel guests Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) and Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) turned into a full-blown yacht party that puts a new spin on the phrase “brotherly love.” (Sorry.) In short: Flashbacks show us that Lachlan and Saxon didn’t only kiss at the party. While having sex with Chloe, Lachlan also got to third base with his own older sibling.
“It was fucking insane,” says Nivola of the scene. “I had never even kissed anyone on camera, let alone done a sex scene. So that whole thing was really scary.” Fortunately, Nivola had ample time to prepare for the moment. “I was on the phone with Patrick when we both knew we got the roles, and we were talking to each other about how we were going to play it,” he recalls. “He said the scene where Chloe says to Saxon, ‘Your brother jerked you off last night’ was in one of his audition sides. And I was like, ‘What the fuck? What?’”
Despite the risqué subject matter, Nivola didn’t have any second thoughts even after he had a chance to read the scene himself. “I never for a second doubted the importance of that scene to the story,” he says. “I was like, ‘Mike [White], I trust you to, of course, make me feel comfortable on set, but I also trust that this is a really important part of the story. You wouldn’t be telling us to shoot it otherwise.’”
It helped that he could also deeply relate to Lochlan—thanks to White’s prowess with the pen. “I knew from the very start what kind of a guy Lochlan was,” says Nivola. “I think that speaks to Mike’s writing—the fact that every scene is a sort of microcosm of who the characters are on the whole. I felt an instant connection with him.”
Vanity Fair: It’s clear Lochlan’s being pulled in multiple directions right at the age where he is trying to figure himself out. What was it like being the monkey in the middle of the Ratliff family?
Sam Nivola: Well, it was easier than it sounds, because I am 21 years old and went through all that very recently. Deciding what I want to do with my life, what kind of person I want to be. Do I want to go to college or not? How much do I want to defy my parents? Those are all pretty universal childhood experiences. It was pretty easy to get into that head space.
The thing that jumps out to me the most is his insecurity. He is a people pleaser, and needs love and attention from people around him. It’s like oxygen to him. I’m totally insecure in the same way that I think everyone is a little bit insecure, but then it was about dialing that up to make it to a point where the insecurity is really a negative leech on your life—making it hard to live. Which was a tough place to bring myself to. It was definitely made better by living on the beach for six months.
How was it filming in Thailand for half a year?
It’s such a fucking unique, singular experience. It’s a reality show where you’re on the island with everyone. You’re living with everyone. I often resent actors who’d go on a whole thing about how, “Oh, I went so method that I really lost myself in the character.” I’m always like, “Okay, that’s bullshit.” But it really did feel like that at times when we were shooting. You’re 10,000 miles away from home—a twelve-hour time difference to New York, which is where my life is—and that’s the worst time difference you can have. You’re basically not talking to anyone that is a part of your real life, and you’re only seeing the people in the show.
Keep in mind, the hotels were shut down to the public because they didn’t want them seeing what we were filming. We’re living in the same bedrooms that are the hotel rooms that are being shot to look like our characters’ rooms. Eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner with our cast mates, talking about the show and living the same lives that our characters were living. The lines between reality and the show totally got blurred, but in a really cool way where everyone got really close really quickly. That made it easier to act and be real and convincing and feel like a family because we essentially had become one very, very quickly.
How did you and Patrick develop that competitive brotherly dynamic?
It was great. Patrick is awesome, and I love him. He’s a really strong close friend of mine now. Developing that dynamic was just really fun. We talked about it a lot and over many, many hours of dinners and lying by the pool. We really took our time with it and even sort of learned new things about our dynamic over the course of the shoot, which was also frustrating. That always happens when you’re five months into a shoot—you realize the most important emotional part center of your character, and you’re like, “Fuck, I wish I knew this going into it.”
Schwarzenegger and NivolaStefano Delia/HBO
What was it like shooting the intimate scene with Patrick and Charlotte?
We shot it on a yacht, and I get really seasick. I hate boats. I get claustrophobic. I’m a total mental disaster when it comes to all of the parameters of when we were shooting that. But I was really comfortable with everyone there. Everyone trusts Mike so much.
I’ve had a lot of interviewers asking me, “Do you feel like the scene is just for shock value?” And I really don’t. I would’ve felt a lot less comfortable shooting it if that’s what it was. I have a thing about sex scenes. I hate it when they put sex scenes in shows and there’s no reason, you know what I mean? Especially if it’s just super hot sex that goes really well and they both enjoy it. It’s like, why? Nothing wrong happened. Nothing weird happened. Nothing happened that changed the dynamic between the characters.
It’s silly, but this is the defining pivot point for me and Saxon’s characters in the show. It really shakes up the dynamic of our whole family. Because it’s such an important piece of our characters’ arcs in the season, I was fully ready to go do it.
Was there an intimacy coordinator present?
We had an intimacy coordinator and she was great. I think it’s so useful that that’s a thing in the film industry now. I talk to my parents all the time about how awkward it was shooting that kind of stuff before that existed. You’re expected to know exactly what you’re doing, but no one really does. Sex is such a personal, vulnerable thing, and I think it definitely needs to be treated with care when there’s a bunch of people with cameras in the room.
When you’re on set, do you ever ask your parents—actors Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer—for advice, or do you keep your craft to yourself?
It depends. I don’t really think that you can get advice on performance from other actors, if that makes sense. It’s such a personal thing—acting and everything that comes along with it. I think that you have to have your own relationship with it and your own understanding of the character. At the end of the day, what makes a performance interesting is what you bring to it yourself. I wish I could somehow distill the experiences that my parents have had as actors over the course of their amazing careers and put it into an elixir and drink it. But just like with any art, you can’t really tell someone how to do it.
I get tons of advice from them about very practical things. Like, they’re great at telling me what I need to ask for in my contracts and tricks for coping with stage fright. How to treat your body over the course of a long shoot in order to have the stamina that you need to keep going. But I never really ask them about the performance itself.
At the end of the episode, Lochlan is meditating when he begins to remember some of what happened the night before. What is he thinking in that moment?
When I have that moment in the monastery, I’m hung over. I’m getting bits and pieces of memory back. It’s probably the first time I’ve been drunk in that way, definitely the first time I’ve ever been high. I think the feeling is complete disorientation and fear.
I am in this meditation room and they’re saying, “Empty your mind, push away your thoughts.” When I push away my thoughts, all that I’m left with is this shocking, horrifying memory. What is supposed to be a sort of zone of tranquility and peace, turns into one of visceral fear. The feeling is panic. I think what’s top of his mind even more than, like, “Oh my God, I’ve just done something terrible,” is “Oh my God, Saxon’s going to be so mad at me. He’s not going to want to talk to me again.” It’s sad.
Where do you think Lochlan falls in terms of his own sexuality?
I think he doesn’t know. I had a long conversation with Mike before we started. I knew I needed to ask him a few questions, but the main one that I wanted to know was “where does Lochlan wind up at the end of this season?” Is the nature of The White Lotus that everyone leaves different than when they came in? Everyone changes and everyone grows for better or for worse?” And he was like, “No, that would be a totally reductive view of what humanity is and the way people react to real life things. Of course, some people change and some people are open to change and some people don’t, and that’s just how it is.”
I don’t think Lochlan really does change. Without revealing exactly what happens, I think that Lochlan comes to The White Lotus completely lost and he leaves completely lost. He is not really any bit more clear about his life than he was when he came in. I think that applies to his sexuality, sure. I think he doesn’t know whether he likes guys or girls or both or whatever. I think the same goes for everything in his life, too. UNC, Duke—he just does not know. Maybe he has a little bit of closure in the fact that he sort of recognizes and knows that he does not know by the end. But that’s the most he gets.
