Warning: This article contains spoilers for The White Lotus season 3, episode 5, “Full-Moon Party.”
Sam Rockwell knows a thing or two about stealing the show. With just a simple, nearly-five-minute monologue about sex, religion, and identity, the Oscar-winner delivered the most WTF moment of The White Lotus season 3 so far. And while his cameo was a well-kept surprise, it makes sense since he’s the real-life romantic partner of Leslie Bibb, who stars as Trump-supporting, toxic trio friend Kate. But Bibb tells Entertainment Weekly that she actually had nothing to do with Rockwell’s casting.
“No, they came to me and they were like, ‘We’re going to offer this to Sam,'” Bibb tells EW. “I was on the treadmill and [producer] Dave Bernad came to me. But I was like, ‘Sam is wild as a buck. Listen, I don’t know what he’s going to do. He’s doing a movie in South Africa, he likes time to prep.’ And he was very nervous about that prep time.”
Leslie Bibb, ‘The White Lotus’. MAX
Bibb knew that the part in question in episode 5, where Walton Goggins‘ Rick meets up with his longtime friend Frank, was not an easy cameo. When Rick heads to Bangkok to seek revenge on the man he thinks murdered his father, he calls up Frank (Rockwell) to get a drink. But what he thinks will be a normal evening catching up with a friend becomes something else entirely: Frank is now sober and a Buddhist, and has gone through quite a personal journey that began with sex addiction. He says he “always had a thing for Asian girls,” so he had as much sex as possible when he got to Thailand, but then he started to think, “Maybe what I really want is to be one of these Asian girls.”
Rick’s wide-eyed silent reaction is perhaps Goggins’ best acting as he tries to listen without judgment (although the judgment is quite clear from his face) as Frank describes the progression of having sex with ladyboys which turned into hiring white men who looked like him to have sex with him while he made himself look like a “ladyboy,” over and over again. “Am I a middle-aged white guy on the inside too? Or inside, could I be an Asian girl?” Frank wondered. “I don’t know. Guess I was trying to f— my way to the answer. Then I realized I’ve got to stop the drugs, the girls, trying to be a girl, I got into Buddhism.” Quite a journey!
“That was a big arc to do that quickly,” Bibb says of the character’s debut. “And [Rockwell] literally went from one [project] to the next, so I said [to producers], ‘You can’t get mad at me if he says no. What if he says no?’ I was so scared! Then [creator] Mike [White] was like, ‘No, no, no, we won’t get mad at you.'”
Bibb laughed as she remembered telling the showrunner, “I was like, ‘That jet plane’s going to fly, I can’t ground him.’ But then it was really sweet — I think Walton really, because they’re very good friends, wanted to have that experience with him.”
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And getting her real-life partner to come join her on the set of The White Lotus was a treat, even if Rockwell got a truncated experience. “It was really fun,” she says. “We don’t have any scenes together, and he did all of his stuff in eight days. We were there for six months, Sam was there for eight days — Sam did not the same experience in eight days. He got The White Lotus light. But it’s nice to be able to have a context to share, and I think he’s a great actor, and we’re lucky to have him, and I think he chewed up that character. Mike was really happy to have him too.”
Bibb did get a bit jealous when she first saw some of Rockwell’s scenes, however. “I saw some stills from them on the boat in Bangkok, and I was like, ‘We’re sweating our faces off, and they were like, hair blowing in the wind,'” she added with a laugh. “Look how cool they look. This is like To Live and Die in L.A., but it was like To Live and Die in Bangkok. It was so cool.”
The White Lotus season 3 airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO.
