For Sabrina Impacciatore, there are three key pleasures in life. She counts them off on her manicured fingers, fixing me with a smoky-eyed stare. “Allora,” she begins. “Of course, sex is the highest pleasure. Then there is food. And then there is acting.” The Italian star, known to most for her standout performance as neurotic hotel manager Valentina in The White Lotus, explains that these joys all have one thing in common: “These are moments where you lose your sense of self. It’s like touching paradise.” Tears begin to fill her eyes. “Acting, to me, is forgetting who I am. It’s going somewhere I've never been before, meeting humans in that place, and discovering life. It’s a moment of big connection. It is” – her voice breaks – “an orgasm.”
It should come as no surprise that Impacciatore’s outsized passion is what has made her famous – at least internationally. After decades of toiling away in the Italian TV and film industry, she channelled all that fervour, eccentricity and depth of feeling into The White Lotus’s Valentina, winning millions of fans for her turn as a lonely, stressed-out, ferocious mess of a woman in the midst of a sexual awakening. Her improvised line, where she tells Jennifer Coolidge’s billionaire Tanya that she looks like “Peppa Pig!”, became an instant meme. An Emmy nomination soon followed.
We have met in central London to discuss her role in Sky’s new American mockumentary The Paper (a spin-off from the US remake of The Office). Everything about her is big and bright. The lips. Bam. The eyes. Bam. The hair. Bam! After the tearful orgasm comment, Impacciatore, who is 57, gestures to her smiling publicist, sitting behind us, and explains that, after a long day of interviews, he is happy with what she’s telling me. “He’s fainted three or four times because of the things that I said [to journalists] before. Now, I’m giving him back some quiet in his heart.” If this is considered safe interview territory, then I’d love to spend time with Impacciatore with the dictaphone turned off.
Our interview takes place in a room that’s been dressed to look like the set of The Paper, which follows the employees of a failing Midwestern newspaper. The show is very funny – even if its message about the state of modern journalism is, at times, pretty bleak. Impacciatore plays Esmeralda Grand, Queen of Clickbait, whose proudest work is an article headlined “You Won’t Believe How Much Ben Affleck Tipped His Limo Driver”. Among a cast of fine comic actors – including Domhnall Gleeson as incoming editor Ned Sampson and Tim Key as business strategist Ken Davies – Impacciatore is the show’s demonic gem. As Esmeralda, she is a constant menace and saboteur, thwarting Ned’s efforts to improve the paper at every turn, and all with a delightfully loose grip on English – “Don’t be so self-defecating!” she admonishes her new boss.
At first, Impacciatore was worried she wouldn’t be able to make the character sympathetic. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, she is really nasty. Are people going to hate me?’” In order to make Esmeralda “somehow lovable”, Impacciatore channelled Tweety, the little yellow bird from the Looney Tunes cartoons, who terrorises Sylvester the cat. “To me, this is how she is.” On the face of it, then, a nightmare. But inside, actually quite sweet.
Not a million miles away, really, from Valentina, the part that changed her life. Impacciatore had been acting for more than 25 years before The White Lotus thrust her onto the world stage. Born in Rome, she joined a local theatre company as a teen and studied with a visiting coach from the Actors Studio, the New York-based school of Method acting. Her breakthrough moment in Italy came when she was in her twenties, on the set of the hugely popular Nineties variety show Non è la Rai, where she performed comedy sketches and her own song, “Né donna né bambina” (in English, “Neither a woman nor a girl”). It made her an Italian TV legend, and an instant queer icon.
She also had early roles in the TV comedies Disokkupati and Le Ragioni del Cuore, as well as the Gabriele Muccino film The Last Kiss. During those years, she says, her popularity among the queer community only became more “palpable”. Not because she was necessarily playing queer roles, but because, in her words, she was embodying a sense of “freedom” and of “overcoming insecurity”. “I had a lot of complexes,” she says, locking me into that stare again. “I was feeling ugly, insecure, never enough, and I put all these weaknesses into my art. I think it was a way to exorcise my fears, but somehow queer people were feeling the same.”
Impacciatore continued to work – though not as much as she’d have liked to – through the Noughties and 2010s, appearing in the historical comedy Napoleon and Me and another Muccino film, There’s No Place Like Home, but she found the Italian industry limiting. “It is a very small market,” she says. “It’s like a little cake that you have to share with so many people, so of course I didn’t feel completely satisfied.”
Five years ago, not long after she turned 50 but before she was cast in The White Lotus, someone “very important” in the Italian industry told Impacciatore that there wouldn’t be any more roles for her because she was too old. “Can you imagine?” she says. “If I think about this, I get mad in a half of a second. I was told, ‘Be prepared to die, because you are not going to work.’” After that crushing comment, and further disheartened by the Covid pandemic and its disastrous impact on many productions, she considered giving up acting. But then, one day, she was invited to audition for Valentina. “I’m still processing what happened with The White Lotus, because it is so big,” she says. “It still feels unreal.”
While she has really enjoyed “receiving love” from The White Lotus fans, she’s found being in the public eye uncomfortable at times. “There is a price to pay, for sure, because I am a very, very wild spirit.” She shoots me a grave look. “Very wild. And so I don’t like so much to be on the spot. I love to be invisible, and to spy on people.”
But she is thankful to be working in American productions, and to have such a wide choice of roles at her fingertips – next, she has a role in Julian Schnabel’s drama In the Hand of Dante, and she will star in an untitled Zoey Deutch and Jon Hamm movie about Hollywood. “All this gives a deeper sense to my life, you know? I didn’t have kids. And a kid can give you this sense of, I don’t know, continuity, or being immortal. And that is what acting is to me.”
Impacciatore’s foray into the US market has also afforded her a life she still can’t believe is her own; filming The Paper in LA, she could afford to stay in a beautiful home. “I have to confess it’s the first time that I could rent a big house with a swimming pool, all by myself, with my own money,” she says. “For the first 10 days of me being in this house, going back home, I would cry every night.”
I desperately avoid watching myself on screen
It was while she was in LA that Impacciatore had a celebrity encounter at a restaurant that she’ll never forget. Al Pacino was sitting at the next table. She managed to resist approaching the Godfather actor for his entire dinner, but then, as he stood up to leave, she rushed over to him. “My body decided for me, not me,” she says. “I went to him, and I went down on my knees. I told him, ‘Thank you maestro, thank you for all the beauty, for all the inspiration, for everything you added to my life.’ And do you know what happened? The king. He went down on his knees and he hugged me, and for a few minutes, we were both on our knees hugging each other. Do you think I will ever forget this? Never ever. I could die very happy.”
Impacciatore is as theatrical in real life as she is on screen. All the same, she can’t bear to watch her performances back. When we speak, the premiere of The Paper is yet to take place. “Oh no, I didn’t watch myself,” she says, her face a picture of terror. “I’m trying to avoid it. Desperately avoiding it. Every time, I try not to watch myself until it’s really necessary, until it’s the premiere. We’ll see what happens then. Hopefully I will not feel sick in front of people. Because that would be very embarrassing.”
All episodes of ‘The Paper’ are available on Sky and streaming service Now
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