Filming ‘The White Lotus' terrified Sam Nivola more than once
"This interview is just gonna be a list of my fears," Sam Nivola says with a laugh. The 21-year-old actor is looking back at his breakthrough performance as people-pleasing Lochlan Ratliff in Season 3 of HBO's The White Lotus and, for the second time in a 20-minute interview with Gold Derby, has referenced working through a phobia.
As part of his first-ever (near) death scene — the result of Lochlan accidentally drinking a poisoned protein shake in the finale — Nivola shot a sequence in which the teen imagined himself drowning. It was filmed toward the end of the cast's lengthy stay in Thailand, when Nivola happened to have two weeks between call times. "It's always weird as an actor when you're not shooting every day. You can sort of psych yourself out. It's better when you're working constantly and you don't have the time to really get nervous or overthink things," he says. "I'm a very claustrophobic person, so I was just thinking about this thing, just freaking out for two weeks."
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Adding to the nervous anticipation, White filmed two versions of Lochlan's surreal white-light moment: the one viewers ultimately saw and one that involved Lochy emerging from a zipped body bag in the water. "I did it, and it was fine, but it was a full-ass day of being in this body bag with a can of air which, I'm sure, for lots of people who have their scuba license, is normal, but I do not, and that shit scares the fuck out of me," he says. "I had to learn how to clear the water out of my nose and everything, and do all this while blind underwater because I didn't have goggles on."
SEE The White Lotus star Sam Nivola talks Lochlan's latest desperate act, teases 'chaotic, complex, devastating' finale
An underwater speaker on a Bangkok soundstage allowed him to hear when "Action!" was called. "I'd take a big breath and then drop the can of air, and then unzip myself and climb out, and then I had to die in the water and start to float back down. But in order to float back down, you need to have no air in your lungs, because if you have air in your lungs, you float up, it makes you buoyant. So I had to time it perfectly so that I had little enough air in my lungs that I would start to float down and look dead, but enough air in my lungs to make it to the top and breathe without suffocating," he explains with another laugh. "So it was a delicate, delicate art that we mastered over the course of a day, and it was really fun in the end. I'm happy I did it, but it was so intense."
To prep for the emotional side of the sequence, Nivola watched interviews with people who've had near-death experiences or flatlined before having their heart restarted and studied "what you see and what you're thinking, and how it's kind of thrilling in a weird way, apparently," he says. "But at the end of the day, I was really trying to wrap my head around the line that Lochlan says, which is, 'I think I saw God.' It feels very important, because it's my character's last line, and obviously this season is about spirituality, and religion to a greater extent. Does that mean my character has changed and gone through some period of growth? Or does it mean he's sort of grasping at straws and trying to try on religion in his last moment in the show and that's still not the right thing for him?"
Stefano Delia/HBO
Nivola's claustrophobia extends to a fear of large crowds in places where he feels trapped — which made filming Episode 5 at a real, packed Full Moon Party on the island of Koh Phangan "terrifying," he admits.
"You have to take a boat to get [there], and then you can't leave until the boat goes home, which is like 2 in the morning or something," he says. "The boat that we took out had to turn back halfway through, because there was a big storm and it was so bumpy that we nearly capsized. And then we finally went back to the party, and it was so intense having to perform as an actor while you can't even hear anything, because there's like fucking house music throbbing in your eardrum at a million decibels, and there's just a million people that are high on God knows what, with their sweaty bodies slamming into you. But, of course, it was also incredibly fun and such a unique experience to shoot at something like that. ... After we finished the scene, we all just stayed there and partied and danced around for a while. It was an unforgettable experience, but it was also sort of terrifying."
While The White Lotus aired earlier this spring, Nivola was busy in Wilmington, N.C., filming the upcoming Bobby Farrelly-directed comedy Driver's Ed and didn't find himself out and about enough to be accosted by fans wanting to dissect scenes like Lochlan's drug-fueled yacht threesome with temptress Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) and Lochlan's finance bro brother, Saxon (). Now, though, he's been hearing the same thing again and again: "Probably five times a day, someone is like, 'I'm happy you didn't die!' My rehearsed answer is, 'Yeah, me, too!'" Nivola says.
Thanks to the success of the show, the son of actors Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer has now experienced another first: being offered roles in films without auditioning. He's also landed some theater auditions, which he hopes will soon pay off. "I really, really want to do a play," he says, adding that he's currently writing one with a pal. "[The White Lotus] is such a machine for catapulting people into a space where they are going to have opportunities to continue to work at the highest level, and I'm crossing my fingers that I'm an example of that because I love doing what I do, and to continue to get opportunities to do it is just like a dream come true. I feel like the luckiest guy in the world."
He'd like to balance more A-list productions that allow him to continue to learn opposite veterans he looks up to, such as his White Lotus parents Jason Isaacs and , with making low-budget films and black box theater with his friends.
"I'm so young that I feel like every day, I learn so much about everything, not just acting," he says. "I feel like I'm at the age where I'm just such a sponge for my life, and I'm just trying to soak it all in."
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