‘The White Lotus’ Actress Sabrina Impacciatore Improvised One Of The More Shocking Laughs Of The Second Season

Warning: This post contains (vague) spoilers for the first and second seasons of The White Lotus.

When she joined the second season of The White Lotus, Sabrina Impacciatore had some big shoes to fill. The Italian actress was cast as Valentina, the manager of the Sicilian outpost for the high end resort chain. The manager in the first season, Armond, didn’t fare so well. Murray Bartlett, who played him, however, fared very, very well. But Impacciatore overcame her anxieties and delivered a similar but different frazzled White Lotus boss, even proving so bold that she improvised one of the season’s more shocking insults.

In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Impacciatore credited her bravery partly to writer-director-creator Mike White, who gave her simple advice. “Be bitchy,” he told her, adding that “the bitchier you are, the more it’s going to work.” She leaned on his advice for a scene she had with Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya, in which she had to interrupt her.

“Three takes, and I couldn’t manage it. The next day, we did the scene again, and I improvised: Jennifer was all in pink, and the first thing I said was: ‘You’re so pink.’ When she asked: ‘Who do I remind you of,’ I replied: ‘Peppa Pig.’ The whole set froze. Then Jennifer broke out laughing. [I was surprised] to see that scene made the final cut. And even more surprised when it went viral worldwide.”

Elsewhere in the interview, the actress admitted she hadn’t watched the show’s first season when she was offered the gig. “[My agent] suggested I watch season 1 of The White Lotus so, that night, I didn’t sleep: I binge-watched all the episodes,” she said. “I swear, it was love at first sight. I thought, ‘This is my sort of thing.’ Drama and comedy in this series are almost overlapping; the lines are very blurry.” And the rest is history.