For all of the complex and diverse mechanisms that can go into producing a good performance, acting is always ultimately distilled into a final product: something to watch. To love acting, it follows that you first have to love watching. And when I speak with Sam Nivola—breakout star of The White Lotus—in the few days following the show’s finale, he talks a lot about simply loving movies. Raised by two exceptional actors, Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola, the young actor’s path to our screens for the past eight Sunday nights was informed by his love of sitting down and watching a good movie.

Many of us just got to know Nivola as Lochlan, the confused youngest brother of the Ratliff family, paralyzed by his excessive desire to be recognized by his siblings. While Lochlan is reserved and anxious, Nivola is exuberant; he carries himself with a humble confidence far beyond his 21 years. In a lot of ways, Nivola is an old soul. His foray into film stems from a precocious Criterion Collection subscription. He loves classic rock and the blues—with exceptions (“I don’t listen to a lot of new music, but I love, love Olivia Rodrigo”). His favorite director is Leos Carax. When asked about his music preference during our VMAN shoot, he consistently insists that he is “fine with anything,” but then very transparently perks up whenever a song written before 1980 comes on. In a particularly endearing moment, someone abruptly changes the song to “You Make Loving Fun” by Fleetwood Mac and Nivola grins, shouting, “Hell yeah!” as he simultaneously flails his arm out to point at the person responsible. Today, fresh off a season of White Lotus in which his character spurred quite a bit of conversation, Nivola is looking forward to spending time working on the production company he runs with his friends, thinking about what’s next, and spending some time at home. 

VMAN sat down with the young actor to talk about shooting a memorable season of White Lotus, working on the upcoming comedy film Driver’s Ed, stepping behind the camera, his burgeoning relationship with fashion, and more.

VMAN: Let’s start at the beginning. You grew up with actor parents, but how did you first start getting into it professionally?

Sam Nivola: I did a lot of school plays and stuff when I was a kid—but the main thing that sort of got me into the whole world was just being into movies. I got a Criterion Channel subscription at a young age, and I got initially obsessed with whatever the sort of pretentious, Letterboxd obsessions of the day were, and that started to refine my tastes a little bit. My parents really didn’t want me to be an actor, which I understand, because it’s a difficult life. But basically I got an audition for a movie through my drama teacher at high school, because they were doing a big open casting call for a Noah Baumbach movie (White Noise). And I was a huge fan of him as a director, you know? And so I was like, I have to do this audition. I know my parents don’t want me to be an actor, but I just want to at least get to the number of callbacks where I get to meet this guy, because I’m a big fan. It was a long audition process. It lasted months and months, and I auditioned, auditioned, and then eventually did get to meet him, and met Greta Gerwig, his lovely wife, and then I got lucky enough to get the part. And at that point, my parents were like, ‘We don’t want you to be an actor, but you can’t really turn down a part in a Noah Baumbach movie.’ So I went and did it, and then one thing led to another, and here I am. I’ve always loved acting, it’s my big passion. But my first love was movies. 

VMAN: Is there anything that happened in this season of White Lotus that you feel like you haven’t gotten to talk about enough? 

SN: I talked about it on Fallon, and I’m surprised more people haven’t asked me about this. But I think the craziest thing that happened over the course of the shoot was us shooting at the Full Moon Party. That’s such a once-in-a-lifetime thing, they had to time it so perfectly. You know, the Full Moon Party happens once a month, on the full moon, we literally took a boat out to this island, an island that you can’t really stay on. You go there on the boat, and you don’t come home until the boat leaves. And we had to turn back twice because there was such a crazy storm that the boat almost capsized. It was literally just a skeleton crew of the actors, sound guy, the cameraman, DP, the director. We just went out into this crowd full of drunk crazies, and shot all this amazing footage. So it was terrifying because it was like, ‘Fuck, we have this one night to nail this and make it real, and if not, we’re fucked.’ But it was really cool to be on a project that has so many millions of dollars behind it, but the director still chooses to sort of go guerilla for realism, when they could recreate that on a sound stage and spend millions getting all the extras and whatever, but it was so much cooler to do it that way. 

VMAN: Working with Mike White, do you feel his love of reality TV? Is it something he’s vocal about?

SN: He’s vocal about it! *Laughs* I had never watched Survivor. I’m not a big reality TV person, but I remember a month into the shoot when he and I were closer and had known each other and could sort of fuck around with each other, he was like, ‘Sam, have you seen my Survivor season?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, no, I’m sorry. I haven’t.’ And he was like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? You have to watch it. I’m gonna send you a link tonight, and you have to watch it.’ He sent me a link a few hours later, and it was fucking hilarious. Yeah, he’s amazing in it. It’s such enjoyable television. He’s so proud of it. There are lots of people from his Survivor season and The Amazing Race who make cameos in the show. It’s cool. It’s just so unpretentious that he does all that stuff and is super proud of it. It’s amazing and bad ass. He’s one of the least pretentious, most genuine creatives that I’ve ever met.

VMAN: What was that experience like shooting Driver’s Ed after being on set for The White Lotus?

SN: It’s always funny going straight from something like The White Lotus to an indie set. Because there are just a lot more parameters, and it’s amazing in certain ways, because those constrictions on what you can and can’t do often make for creative solutions to those problems. It’s funny, I was just giving this spiel in my pitch this morning trying to explain that I could make a movie for very little money. For example, Squid and the Whale would not have been as good if Noah had $100 million. It was my first time I’ve ever really done out and out comedy. Because in a way Lotus is comedic and it’s funny, but it’s also very real, and Bobby Farrelly’s kind of comedy is, I would argue, somewhat more surreal and heightened—just full-on jokes. And it’s amazing to play that and it gives you more freedom to improvise and just kind of go for it. And you’re laughing all day, which is so good for your mental health. Everyone there was so amazing. Bobby’s so amazing. All of the cast were so great to work with. 

VMAN: You have your own production company, can you tell us a little bit about Cold Worm Production and what you’re working on?

SN: It’s my production company that I started with two of my best friends, Teddy Ryan, who I’ve known since I was about two years old, and Anthony Ertle, who I met actually when I was shooting White Noise, the Bambacuh movie, because he was my “on-set guardian,” even though he was only a few years older—I was 17 at the time. He is from Cleveland, Ohio, which is where we shot it, and he went to film school, and he’s a total genius. We all just love movies, and wanted to make them. So we started this little company, and we made a few short films, one of which I just premiered on YouTube (Why Not, Pat?). We decided not to go the festival route because it’s just our sort of first work, but I think it’s really good. And that was a sort of proof of concept. And now we’ve made two features that are in post-production. We have a third one coming along. I just had a pitch for it this morning that went really well. We’re working a lot more than we thought we would at this early stage, but it’s really fun. We have a website that we realized we were paying for nothing. So we started a film criticism blog that we put up on there once a month, depending on how hard we want to work on it. We’re doing a lot of fun things, they’re some of the best people I know, and they all just really care about movies. We’re all spending a lot of our own money to get these things made, because we just really care about it. 

VMAN: That’s amazing. Are you writing, directing, producing—a little bit of everything?

SN: Yeah, so the short was written and directed by me and starring me as well—and funded by me and all that. We have produced these two features, one of which is made by a friend of Anthony from film school out in Nebraska. It’s a sort of psychedelic study on queer romance in Nebraska that’s very different from our other one, which is about two broke kids kidnapping someone for ransom in Wales. They’re both by people who we somehow found their scripts, and we really believed in them. And they’re great.

VMAN: Have you felt your approach to acting shifting at all as you’ve been focusing on directing?

SN: Absolutely. The first thing I always say to directors when I work with them is just, you don’t have to protect me and my sort of actor-y brain. Because I think about things with more of a director’s brain. And if you want to just tell me what you’re trying to get out of this scene, what you want out of this shot, it will allow me to find my place in that more. You can tell me, this shot will look better if you’re doing this. Not everything has to be like, ‘This is how you’re feeling.’ Sometimes, to me, understanding what the director is trying to evoke is sort of a quicker avenue for me to understand what my character’s feeling.

VMAN: Are there any actors that you especially loved growing up or have informed you as an actor?

SN: I always say my favorite actor is Juliette Binoche, the French actor. She’s just amazing. I have a signed picture of her. She’s just the coolest, and I’ve had such a crush on her since I was little. I love Marcello Mastroianni. I obviously love [Robert] De Niro and [Al] Pacino. John Cazale, all his movies, him in The Deer Hunter, so heartbreaking. I love all those guys. And I think [in] modern days, I fucking love [Timothee] Chalamet. I think he’s amazing and doing great work. He’s one of those people who you can’t really poke holes in any of his performances. He’s just so good.

VMAN: What are you excited about right now?

SN: I’m really excited because this show coming out has just given me so many great job opportunities and auditions and offers, and I’m getting a lot of fucking exciting stuff in my inbox. But I’m also excited to take a break. I want to chill for a few months, at least, because I’ve been burning the candle at both ends. Mainly I’m excited to just keep working on Cold Worm and getting these movies made, because I’ve been taking my foot off the gas on that since acting a lot this year and doing a lot of prep. My production company is just as important to me as my acting, and I want to honor that this year.

VMAN: You’ve been attending some runway shows recently, how would you describe your relationship to fashion over the years?

SN: I grew up in a family that wasn’t really in the fashion world, so everything I know about fashion, I’ve learned in the past year and a half or so. I’ve now been to a fair few shows and walked in a Miu Miu show, and have great relationships with all these brands. And it’s fascinating. It’s a new kind of art to me that I’m dipping my toe in to try and understand as an art form in this sort of luckiest, most grand, amazing way. I’m getting to be at all these shows and see all these amazingly talented legends of fashion—like Jonathan Anderson—and all those people do their thing. I’m sort of starting to learn that right now is a really important, monumental and special time in the fashion world, and it’s so cool to get involved with it while learning about it for the first time. It’s such a privilege. 

VMAN: You’ve spoken about how you’ve played some similar roles so far. What would be a dream role of yours specifically, or just kind of areas that you’d like to dive into more as an actor in the future?

SN: I get asked that question a fair amount, and I have a good answer, which is that I think my dream role is a role that I couldn’t describe to you. Because I think the best roles are roles that aren’t an archetype. I could tell you right now, which is true in my sort of shallowest of souls, that I would love to—I’ve played a lot of nerdy, kind of small dudes—and I’d love to get jacked and be in an action movie. But really the best roles in a movie like There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s character was so amazing, because you’ve never seen that before. Like who is that guy? That’s a totally new kind of guy that I’ve never heard of. That’s what I’d love my next one to be. 

Photography Isaac Anthony

Fashion Nicola Formichetti

Creative Director / Editor-in-Chief Stephen Gan

DP/Video Mynxii White

Casting Greg Krelenstein (gk-ld)

Grooming Jenny Sauce (The Wall Group) using Armani Beauty and Oribe 

Lighting Assistants Isaac Schell  John Vetromile

Stylist Assistants Arut Arustamyan  Adlet Bermukhamedov

Location Splashlight Studios

Post production Kushtrim Kunushevci Retouch