Illustration: María Jesús Contreras
“Can you hear this sound?” Sabrina Impacciatore asks, holding up her laptop on a summery succulent-filled patio. “It’s the crickets singing. They sing all day long. It’s incredible.” The eternally enthusiastic Italian actress is at her escape on the island of Formentera — near Ibiza, she explains, gesticulating wildly as she maps the Mediterranean for me with her hands — taking some time to recharge amid her increasingly busy schedule. She’s well known in her home country, where she first started acting as a teenager on variety shows before segueing into comedic and dramatic roles in film and on television. But after nabbing the part of the stern hotel manager Valentina in the second season of The White Lotus (2022), Impacciatore was launched into Hollywood fame. “It was like in Italy when the football team wins the championship,” she tells me. “Everybody had watched the match.”
Now, Impacciatore will continue her conquest of America by inserting herself into an even more beloved national franchise. In The Paper, a spinoff of The Office that airs on Peacock, Impacciatore plays Esmeralda Grand, the managing editor of a floundering local newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, who has previously appeared on the reality show Married at First Sight (which explains how she got to the U.S.). Esmeralda is incompetent, egotistic, and, thanks to Impacciatore’s ace comedic timing, totally fabulous. She has no knowledge of how journalism works but refuses to give up her power over the newsroom to Domhnall Gleeson’s upstart new editor-in-chief. In terms that viewers of the original series might understand, Esmeralda falls somewhere between the tyranny of Michael Scott, the absurdity of Dwight Schrute, and the self-involvement of Kelly Kapoor with a particular charisma that only Impacciatore could pull off. You have to listen to the way she delivers words like asexual and TTT online yourself. The character is a far cry from Impacciatore’s own personality, she insists, but they do have a crucial similarity: “I want to keep working in America because these roles are very complex, very well written,” Impacciatore says. “I just want to stay! So, yes, I have this in common with Esmeralda.”
The Office has been remade in many countries around the world since the original British version but never in Italy. Had you watched it before you heard about The Paper?
I had no idea about this show. I knew it was a cult show, but I hadn’t seen it. I was boarding a plane back from Cape Town to Italy after a film shoot, and I got a call from my agents. There was an audition for The Paper in 24 hours. Can you imagine? So during the flight, I watched a few episodes of The Office — the American version by Greg Daniels [who co-created The Paper] — and I got terrified. I thought, No, this is too brilliant. I arrived in Italy, and I had to learn 11 pages of monologues. English is not my first language, so that was really challenging. But because I was coming from being in the savanna shooting a movie, I decided I would just be like an animal and follow my instincts. I didn’t remember the lines in this audition on Zoom, and I started to improvise. I thought it was really going badly because I didn’t hear any sound, but after 45 minutes, they appeared on the Zoom and unmuted and said they had been laughing out loud. Could I do that again in two days with the real script?
How did the second audition go?
Guarda, it was a nightmare. I asked all my friends if they knew an American person in Rome, and finally I found this girl who was an art student and invited her to my place, and we repeated the lines for hours. I had two other auditions for other projects, all in three days, so I didn’t sleep. But I was crazy in love with Esmeralda, and when she was pretending to cry in a scene, I really cried. At the end of the audition, they said, “Don’t you understand she’s just being manipulative?” I said, “I know. But she’s really good at that.”
So the character wasn’t written as an Italian woman.
My agents told me that they were looking for an American actress, but I think they just got curious about me because they saw me in The White Lotus. It was a big difference for the character to switch to being an Italian woman who had married an American guy. Now she’s a single mom after being divorced. I told them that Esmeralda doesn’t want to go back to Italy. Now she has to make it here. And I wanted to add an element of innocence. Do you know that yellow bird with the cat in the cartoon?
Tweety Bird?
That was my inspiration for her. I thought she’s doing nasty things but just to survive. Just to not be eaten by the cat.
Esmeralda is introduced with her hair clips in, and she’s very aware of her appearance on-camera. Did you have input on her style?
I think Esmeralda wants to use the documentary situation to become a TV star, and to her, a star is like someone from the 1950s, like Rita Hayworth in Gilda. The waves in her hair are because she wants to be Gilda. On the first day on set, I even did the same thing as Rita in Gilda [mimics Hayworth’s famous hair flip]. From that idea, many other things came with the help of our costume designer, Kathleen Felix-Hager. Esmeralda uses a ring light because she’s scared she’s not pretty on-camera. And she wears a lot of gold, like those belts. I would love it if people dressed up as her at Halloween.
Photo: Aaron Epstein/PEACOCK
It’s pretty clear Esmeralda knows nothing about journalism. But did you learn much about how a newspaper actually works?
No, I really avoided that. I didn’t want to speak with any journalists because she knows nothing. Of course, she ended up there for some reason, but probably she’s just very good at selling things. She’s good at hooking people, catching their attention, which is good for her job, too.
Once you started, did you keep watching the American version of The Office?
I became addicted to it. I am very bad at watching series because I don’t have time. I’m terrible at organizing my life. But when I started to watch The Office, my mood was always better and I just couldn’t go one day without watching two or three or four episodes. Then I was just in awe. So when I got the role in The Paper, I decided I needed to be blessed, at least, by Steve Carell. Greg told me Steve was in New York doing Uncle Vanya, and I thought, I have to see him. I took a flight from Rome to New York and bought tickets to the show, and he was fantastic. Then I went to the greenroom and introduced myself. He was so sweet. He made me feel very good about it, and he said Greg is a genius and I was going to enjoy this process.
You started performing on TV as a young woman on the Italian variety show Non è la Rai. How did you discover you had a knack for comedy?
When I was 8 years old, I wrote in my diary that I would be an actress and my life would be a movie. When I was 16, there was an elective theater workshop, and after that I studied for two years with that same theater company. When I was 18, they hired me. So I started with theater, studying with Italian teachers and then with a coach from the Actors Studio who had come to Rome. I had an epiphanic call at that moment, and I knew that, even as I was studying marketing and trying to make my parents happy by being a serious person, I wanted to keep studying acting. The role on Non è la Rai came by chance. Being a comedian was something I didn’t understand right away. But the director of the show and my coach said I had an incredible sense of comedy. So on the show, I was improvising and writing my own characters, but I never stopped studying as an actor. I’ve kept challenging myself throughout my career, doing many different things.
Most Americans first discovered you as Valentina on The White Lotus. How often do people come up to you here and quote the line you told Jennifer Coolidge about how her character looks like Peppa Pig?
It’s happened so many times. And that actually came out of a moment of terror because on my first day of filming with Mike White and Jennifer, I was just in awe of her. Mike came up to me and said, “Sabrina, the more bitchy you are, the more Valentina is funny.” I was scared because I thought, I can’t be a bitch to Jennifer. Mike is going to fire me. But she looked at me and said, “How do I look?” And she was dressed in pink, and I said, “Peppa Pig.” I don’t know why. It was just to save my life.
You’ve described being terrified of living up to the quality of the show as it was filming. How did it feel once it came out and was a big hit?
I was supposed to go back to Italy after the premiere, but I decided to stay in the U.S. I wanted to see how people would react. Then I felt my life change in one day. I used to go to the same cafeteria in West Hollywood, and the Monday after the first episode, people were suddenly coming up to me: “Are you the hotel manager in The White Lotus? Oh my God!” Then there were two things that made me feel like my life would really change: Jimmy Kimmel invited me onto his show, and I got the Emmy nomination. That was a miracle because I didn’t campaign. I was in South Africa shooting.
Did people in Italy watch The White Lotus?
In Italy, it’s a lot more of a niche thing because you have to have the cable platform to watch it. But it’s a very good niche to be in, a niche of people that are cultivated and look for high-quality shows.
In addition to The Paper, you also have a role in a new movie by Julian Schnabel, In the Hand of Dante. That seems very different from The Paper in terms of tone.
When my agents told me Julian Schnabel was looking for me, I thought it was a joke. I’ve admired his work for years. I saved his number in my phone as oh my god!!!! [She holds up his contact info on Zoom to confirm this.] But he offered me the part with no audition, and the role is very far from me and from Valentina. It’s a small role, but it’s a very strong role and a very dramatic role. I got to work with Oscar Isaac and with Jason Momoa. Him being my boyfriend? Come on!
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