“Fuckin’ hot!” are the first words out of Sam Nivola’s mouth when I meet him in the back of a small Japanese restaurant.
I’ve just asked him “How are you?” and it’s a fair response, considering it’s the hottest day in New York City since 2012. We’re on St. Mark’s Place, where the triple-digit temperature has caused even the crust punks, a mainstay of this stretch of the East Village, to slither toward refuge in tattoo parlors and liquor stores.
“I walked two blocks to get down here, and I’m pouring with sweat already,” says Nivola, clad in a “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” T-shirt and a baseball cap concealing his boyish brown curls. I omit the fact that I arrived 15 minutes early for the sole purpose of drying my face with paper towels in the restroom.
“This weather is gnarly,” he says. “It’s worse than Thailand!”
Nivola spent seven months on that country’s sweltering beachfront shooting Season 3 of “The White Lotus,” in which he played the brooding and awkward teenager Lochlan Ratliff, whose desire to impress his older brother, played by Patrick Schwarzenegger, results in a near-death smoothie experience and some brother-on-brother incest. The role turned the 21-year-old Nivola into one of Hollywood’s most promising young stars — and perhaps a new kind of sex symbol.
“It’s totally changed my life and the scope of my career,” says Nivola, who previously had modest parts in the Noah Baumbach film “White Noise” and the Nicole Kidman-led Netflix whodunit “The Perfect Couple.” “When ‘The White Lotus’ was at its peak, I literally couldn’t walk down the street in Brooklyn — my hometown — without being swarmed.”
The swarming got so bad that, in search of a quiet place away from all the fanfare, Nivola and his friends once prompted ChatGPT, “What is the worst bar in the East Village?” The result was a taproom where speaking is strictly prohibited. “We’re yelling, ‘This place is fucking awesome!’ and everyone’s like, ‘Shhh!’” recalls Nivola, buckling forward, index finger pressed to his lips.
Richie Shazam for Variety
Perhaps this is why Nivola has brought me here, to this mostly vacant “sleeper hit” of a restaurant tucked underneath a barbershop. He’s taken command of the menu. When I ask him what’s good, he rattles off a handful of dishes before asking eagerly, “Are you down to share?”
Nivola grew up in the Brooklyn indie film scene. He watches one to two movies per day. He begins more than one sentence with “Not to be pretentious, but …” In other words, acting is in his blood. But his parents, Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola (of “Newsroom” and “Face/Off” fame, respectively), initially discouraged him from following in their footsteps, fearing their son would hurtle himself toward an unstable and often difficult life. They forbade him from auditioning for roles before he turned 18.
Still, when Nivola was 17, his high school drama teacher helped him net an audition for “White Noise,” in which he’d play the son of Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig’s characters. It was during the pandemic, and Nivola sent in a self-tape in secret. He only told his parents about the opportunity once he made it to the next round. “Holy fucking shit, it’s a Noah Baumbach movie?! You have to do the callback!” he remembers his parents saying. (Nivola’s younger sister, May, ended up playing his sibling in the film.)
I say the words “nepo baby,” and Nivola breaks into tickled laughter. “Other than my genes, I don’t think I can attribute much of my success to my parents,” he says. “I feel proud that I’ve done it for myself, and sometimes in spite of them.”
Of his first movie role, he says, “I didn’t get my dad’s agent to call up so-and-so. I did it by myself. I didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to be able to say that anything I’ve achieved has been because of anyone other than me. And I’m proud of that.”
These days, when a Nivola family stroll is interrupted by a fan asking for a selfie, odds are the camera is pointed toward Sam. “But that just goes to show the trappings of fame,” he says. “Because I’m not half as talented as my father or my mother.”
If Nivola’s first leap of faith was the secret audition tape, then his second was dropping out of college after just one semester at Columbia, where he studied Latin and film. “My parents were upset,” he says. “It totally scared them, which is understandable. I wasn’t happy at the time because I couldn’t dedicate everything in me to acting. And,” he says, blushing, “I have problems with authority figures.”
Nivola spent the next couple years auditioning, with his big break happening just a few months before his friends put on caps and gowns.
The story of how Nivola landed “The White Lotus” is “boring,” he insists between sips of beer. There was a tape, then a callback read with Mike White, and then three days later he got the part. “I’m just grateful that there are people who are not casting things based on how many Instagram followers you have,” Nivola says. (He has 145,000.) “They’re casting based on who is right for the job. Like, ‘You might not be Jacob Elordi, but you’re the guy.’”
Richie Shazam for Variety
If the casting process was unremarkable, the filming was anything but. The shooting of the third season of “The White Lotus” was, by the accounts of some of Nivola’s castmates, a seven-month slog that featured unbearable humidity, sickness and behind-the-scenes drama. And throughout that time, Nivola lived in a hotel room that was identical to Lochlan’s. While it was isolating and confusing, those blurred lines made it easier for him to step into the character.
“I’ve always been the actor that’s like, ‘You got too stuck in your character? Fuck you. That’s bullshit,’” says Nivola. Then he traveled across the world and hung out almost exclusively with actors playing his family members, including Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey, who rarely dropped those North Carolina accents. “Sometimes I actually felt like I wasn’t myself,” Nivola says. “I finally understood the thing of getting lost in your character.”
And that brings us to the incest. When the drug-fueled intimacy between on-screen brothers lit the internet on fire, Nivola didn’t take kindly to the discourse. “It was at times painful. It’s hard when people view your character as a monster or pervert or freak,” he says.
Headlines deemed the scene, in which Lochlan kisses his brother on the mouth and then jerks him off in a threesome, “shocking,” “sickening” and “so disgusting and unnecessary.” On social media, Lochlan was labeled a “creep” and a “sicko.” Meanwhile The Daily Beast asked, “Is It OK to Think the ‘White Lotus’ Incest Scene Was Hot?,” and Nivola’s DMs were flooded with thirsty older men.
“It was hard feeling like people had lost sympathy for this guy that I lived inside. I got a little defensive,” Nivola says. “You have to love your character, otherwise you’re fucked. My character jerked off Patrick. I don’t like that. It’s a bad thing he did. But I try not to pass judgment.”
After “The White Lotus,” Nivola says he’s been inundated with offers to play similar roles — “socially awkward, virginal kids who are a little weird,” as he defines it. “I’m starting to feel a little boxed in by the characters I’ve played in my career. But I’m also finally getting offers to do things where I’m a little more grown up. Hopefully the next one will be something a little different.”
Nivola is set to star opposite fellow “White Lotus” alum Connie Britton in Hulu’s coming-of-age mystery “Phony.” And he recently wrapped production on a Bobby Farrelly film, “Driver’s Ed,” that he hopes will breathe life into a wilting genre: the R-rated comedy. (“We say ‘fuck’ so many times,” he assures.)
“It’s rare to have comedies at all. It’s been pretty dry for a little while,” Nivola says. (He lives with his girlfriend, Iris Apatow, whose father, Judd Apatow, reinvented the studio comedy in the 2000s.) “Can you think of any good ones that have come out in the last five years? Other than ‘Friendship’?” He attributes the decline to studios being more financially “conservative.”
“They’ve ‘Moneyball’-ed the film industry!” Nivola says, pointing his chopsticks at me in a Wolverine claw. “Everything is about data now — and trying to predict, to the nearest dollar, how much money a movie’s going to make. It screws the idea of risk-taking, and comedy is more about risk-taking than any other genre.”
In terms of careers he admires, the first name on Nivola’s mind is Tom Cruise. “He’s excelled in every kind of movie,” he says. “He gives one of the greatest comedic performances of all time in ‘Tropic Thunder,’ and he’s not at all a comedian. ‘Jerry Maguire,’ ‘Risky Business,’ ‘Magnolia’ — he’s an incredible dramatic actor. And then he has this whole latter half of his career of being an action star.”
Richie Shazam for Variety
But when ageless box office magnets like Cruise exist, Nivola isn’t convinced Hollywood is interested in birthing new ones.
“The old movie stars are getting plastic surgery, and they’re looking younger and they’re staying young. You have these really old people playing young roles. And it’s not giving any space for the young’uns to move in and make a name for themselves,” Nivola says. “With all due respect to those people, one day they won’t be here anymore, literally, and they will have to create new stars.”
He adds, “I think Timothée Chalamet is one of the best actors alive, and he’s a total star. He’s one of a very few examples I could come up with. But it’s a different kind of movie star; he’s not huge and jacked. He looks a little more like me.” Nivola glugs down the rest of his lager. “I wish!”
Even in his young career, Nivola has worked with some of today’s most celebrated talent. In “White Noise,” he uttered the words of an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and acted opposite two Oscar nominees. On “White Lotus,” he put his trust into television’s topmost taboo breaker.
And on Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro,” he learned the hard way the humbling power of the edit. In the Oscar-nominated biopic, Nivola played Leonard Bernstein’s son, Alexander. He remembers filming a pivotal scene with Cooper in which the legendary composer reprimands his son for smoking a joint before the boy confronts him about his lifetime of hypocrisy and infidelity, saying something to the effect of “You’re cheating on my mother with men. Who are you to tell me what to do?”
When the film premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2023, SAG-AFTRA was on strike, so Nivola gave his tickets to some buddies and planned to meet up with them for a drink afterward. Nivola was waiting at a bar around the corner when his friends broke the news: “Dude, you’re not really in the movie.” Nivola was dumbfounded: “‘What do you mean? What about my big scene?!’”
He admits now, “I was slightly annoyed to be chopped out of the movie. But, annoyingly, it was the right decision.” Bisecting a piece of spicy tuna on rice cake with a chopstick, he says, “I don’t like to be the guy that gets their feelings hurt about being cut out.”
Nivola praises Cooper as an “innovative filmmaker” and a “lovely guy,” and says he still thinks about what he calls the “Bradley Cooper shot”: “Just taking a camera around and following the actors around and letting them do whatever they want and rolling for 30 minutes straight.”
It’s just now settling in for Nivola that he is, by all metrics, a successful actor. For a kid who was raised by famous people, he never expected to be famous himself. “I love acting so much that I would be totally content working a run-of-the-mill, 9-to-5, minimum-wage job for the rest of my life if I got to do this on weekends,” he says. So now that he is surrounded by a team of industry professionals and his phone is ringing off the hook, he finds himself in a surprising predicament.
“It’s a lot easier when you’re starting at ground zero to look upwards and be like, ‘There’s all this exciting stuff that could happen but probably won’t’ versus being catapulted to the top of this totem pole where suddenly it’s like, ‘How do I hold on to it? How do I stay up here?’ At least, that’s what people tell you your mindset has to be,” Nivola says. “It’s scarier to hold on to something for dear life than it is to be grasping at a potential future.”
Plus, it’s a weird time in Hollywood. Movie theaters are shuttering, production has plunged and thousands of gig workers are scrambling to find work. Opportunities to audition are few and far between. Earlier this year, as if these anxieties bubbled up to the point of combustion, Los Angeles, the global center of the movie industry, literally burst into flames.
“One of the biggest fears I have is that nothing can afford to shoot in America anymore,” Nivola says. The business model of moviemaking in the U.S. is so out of whack that “you can hire a team of 10 gaffers in Hungary for cheaper than hiring one key grip in Los Angeles.”
“It’s so silly, Trump saying he’s going to put a tariff on foreign films,” he says. “That’s the opposite of what we need to be doing. It’s not that we shouldn’t be watching foreign films; it’s that we need more tax incentives to shoot movies in America.”
He wishes the U.S. would take a lesson from the state-funded British Film Institute, which promotes filmmaking in the U.K. — and subsidizes movie tickets to people under 26 at Nivola’s favorite London cinema. “It’s mobbed with kids my age watching weird, old Kurosawa movies,” he says. “It’s packed every weekend because it’s cheap, and that’s because taxpayer dollars are going toward art instead of toward fucking missiles.” He stakes his chopsticks into the table. “Not to sound cliché, but it’s just so frustrating. Like, take a little bit of that Tomahawk money and put it into movies and inspire a generation of people.”
He sets his utensils down and smiles. “I also must plead ignorance and say I don’t know what I’m talking about. I took a crash course in economics in college.”
We’ve spent half our dinner trash-talking Hollywood, so Nivola wants to make one thing clear: “I just want to say for the record that I am optimistic about the future of the film industry.”
A couple years ago, he started a production company called Cold Worm with two of his best friends. They’ve made two feature films on five-figure budgets — one funded entirely by grants and the other by private investors. Nivola has directed a short film through the banner — about a lovesick stoner who falls victim to a flirtatious scheme — and he’s written several scripts that he’s in the process of pitching. It’s a priority for Cold Worm to land an overall deal at a studio, but Nivola says, “We’d rather make good movies than get filthy rich.”
It was not long ago in Wales that Nivola realized the dream of indie filmmaking is still alive. He was shooting a movie in what he calls “the most depressing town in Europe” on a shoestring budget, sharing a bed with his two co-producers. They didn’t have enough towels, so they attempted to air-dry their bodies in the freezing temperatures. “It was miserable,” Nivola says, “and it was one of the most fun times of my life.”
A bunch of kids, joyously suffering for a shared vision, journeying into the unknown to make something from nothing. “That will never die,” insists Nivola. “As long as there are people fighting the fight and trying, it’s going to be OK.”
Styling: Alex Badia; Senior Fashion Market editor; Emily Mercer; Senior Market editor, accessories: Thomas Waller; Fashion assistants: Ari Stark and Kimberly Infante; Grooming: Kumi Craig/The Wall Group; Look 1 (trench coat): Full look: Calvin Klein Collection; Look 2 (cover, tank top): Full look: Acne Studios; Look 3 (black look): Coat, blazer, sweater and pants: Ferragamo; Belt: Déhanche, Gloves: 032C; Look 4 (popcorn): Jacket: Marine Serre; Shirt: Gucci; Pants: Louis Gabriel Nouchi; Tie: Brooks Brothers
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