Sam Rockwell on Frank's ‘White Lotus' backstory, Woody Harrelson's influence, and going all in on ‘this arc of Buddhist to Bad Lieutenant'

Yahoo

16-06-2025

Sam Rockwell's now-legendary monologue in The White Lotus almost sounded very different. As you may recall, Woody Harrelson was originally slated to play the role of Frank, the 10-month sober and celibate friend of Walton Goggins' Rick. Due to a scheduling shift, Harrelson dropped out and Rockwell stepped in.
"With that monologue, there's many ways to go, and I think someone's tendency might be — or even my tendency was — to do a Southern accent. I guess because Woody was gonna do it, I had a kind of very sort of masculine Southern accent in my head," Rockwell tells Gold Derby. "So occasionally I would do that [while prepping]. And then I just realized that in order to really get to what was really great about that monologue, I had to get more of Sam in there."
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The simpler the better, he thought, because creator Mike White encapsulates the theme of Season 3 in those five minutes. "The conflict between the search for spirituality and selfishness, that's what most of the characters are struggling with," Rockwell says. "That's why it has to be uber, uber, uber honest and come from this place of gravitas."
Should the Oscar winner take home his first Emmy, he'll have many reasons to thank his partner, Leslie Bibb. After White, who worked with Rockwell on 2009's Gentlemen Broncos and 2020's The One and Only Ivan, offered him the part, Bibb convinced him to take it. She'd already been cast as pseudo Real Housewife of Austin Kate, devoured the scripts, and knew how special the monologue was: "Really, this is what Mike is talking about: How we want to live our life, and the honesty with which we want to live our life, the vulnerability with which we want to live our life, and risking getting to know who we are, and is who I am in here different from who I am out here — that balance between spirit and form,' she told Gold Derby.
Rockwell only hesitated because he was filming Gore Verbinski's Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, with its own 10-page monologue, and was afraid he wouldn't have enough prep time to do White's writing justice. He'd normally want four months to go through his process; he had something like six weeks, he recalls. Bibb visited him on location in South Africa, and while the two were on safari, they spent their afternoons between game drives drilling lines to get him off book. He half-joked with White that he might need a teleprompter or cue cards, and the White Lotus crew had an earwig prepared to assist him, but he didn't need it. He was able to film the length of the monologue in single takes.
"What's great about Mike is he told me to slow down. I was doing it very fast, and he's not afraid of pauses and taking time," Rockwell says.
He consulted with his longtime acting coach, Terry Knickerbocker, who helped him get to the heart of Frank. For the monologue, they discussed Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. "Because [Frank] is struggling with spirituality and selfishness, and the need for pleasure and this inward femininity, I really think the exterior needed to be very masculine to juxtapose that, for me to make it interesting," Rockwell says. It was implied in the script that Frank and Rick were ex-military. "Frank gives him a gun, we had a checkered past. Maybe we were mercenaries. We didn't want to get too specific about it, but I got a Navy SEAL tattoo that nobody would notice, the frog skeleton, and I got some scars to kind of rough up my exterior a little bit. I shaved my head," Rockwell says.
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He drew from own past roles as well: "Choke [2008] was a movie I did that was about a sex addict, and that was good preparation for this monologue. And then I'd done stuff where I played an ex-Navy SEAL, so I'd already done that research. And then there was the Buddhism aspect, I just watched a couple of documentaries. And I did Drunks [1995] with Parker Posey, which was about Alcoholics Anonymous and NA. It's funny, it's like you play Laertes before you play Hamlet, you know, and there's an apprenticeship. So a lot of the parts that I've done, there were aspects of Frank in and it all came together."
Knickerbocker suggested an idea that Rockwell ultimately pitched to White: That when Frank poses as Hollywood director Steve to aid Rick's revenge, it's almost a separate character to play. "That's why we had the Tony Scott sort of baseball cap, and the Members Only jacket, kind of what Frank's idea of a director might have been from the '80s or '90s."
When Frank and Rick celebrate the latter's short-lived closure with a night on the town and return to the hotel with company, the scene was originally scripted as Frank just having sex, Rockwell shares. "I said, 'You know, we should really do this arc of Buddhist to Bad Lieutenant, and maybe I should be smoking crack. And there should be something kind of dangerous, like a knife or something. And we had some nunchucks — I mean, that got a little silly. So we had the crack pipe, and the girls were there hanging out, and I just said, 'Let's do this [bit showing them my knife skills].' I'd done this movie Mr. Wright [2015] where I learned some of this knife stuff. … It was a way to show his nuttiness."
As for the hilarious roll Rockwell performs when Frank chases a departing Rick down the hallway, the actor says that probably came from his fight training for 2024's Argylle. "That was a bad roll. That was a terrible role. I would hope I could do a better role than that, but he's sort of still drunk," he explains, laughing as he remembers that he took pictures off the wall in some takes. The animal-print briefs he was wearing were "an homage to Ray Liotta in Something Wild, or maybe Richard Gere in American Gigolo, an homage to those kind of dangerous archetypes, Tom Berenger in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.'
There could have been even more action in Frank's arc, it turns out. "We had a bar fight that we shot that was cut," Rockwell reveals. "It was a bar fight where I defend this transgender waitress from these Russian guys."
All in all, he spent about two and a half weeks on the show, filming his scenes as director Steve to get his sea legs before tackling the monologue opposite Goggins, whose reaction shots are priceless. Those two have been good friends for 15 years, since meeting on 2011's Cowboys & Aliens. 'I don't know if I've ever had that experience, acting with a close friend playing close friends," Rockwell says. "I had an instinct that we would have this kind of Butch-Sundance thing going. You know this Cagney-and-Lacey kind of thing. I think Walt did, too, and Leslie did. I knew we'd have a shorthand, and we could make each other laugh. … Walt and I come from a similar background. We're both latchkey kids, [raised by] single parents, and we both performed with our mothers when we were very young. He did clogging contests with his mother, which is kind of Southern tap-dancing, and I did a play with my mom when I was 10. I'm a city kid, he's a country kid, but we definitely identify. We've worked in restaurants, and we've been broke, me and Walt. So we have a lot in common."
It's difficult to imagine another actor playing Frank — even Harrelson has said he wouldn't have done as fantastic a job as Rockwell did. "I think he would have been amazing. I'd love to have seen Woody's version of Frank," Rockwell says of his costar from 2012's Seven Psychopaths and 2012's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. "I couldn't stop thinking about him, actually, while I was doing it. It definitely influenced my interpretation."
To date, he hasn't heard Harrelson's review in person. "I haven't seen him in a while. I'm sure he'll have something to say. He'll make some joke," Rockwell says with a grin. "He's one of my favorite people. He's one of the funniest people I know. He's mischievous. I love Woody. So we'll talk about it at some point, and he'll say something really witty, I'm sure."
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