Last summer, while shooting a movie in South Africa, Sam Rockwell got a call from Mike White. The creator of The White Lotus needed an actor to deliver a standout monologue halfway through the show’s third season in Thailand, and had his sights set on the 56-year-old actor to deliver it. At the time, Rockwell had already been working on a monologue for another project, and worried that taking on another one (and flying thousands of miles across the globe to deliver it) might cut into his preparation. But after two of the show’s cast members—his partner, Leslie Bibb, and best friend Walton Goggins—urged him to jump at the opportunity, Rockwell relented. “I was sort of teetering,” he tells GQ. “And then I made a few pitches to Mike and we decided to do it.”
The collaboration proved fruitful. In the season’s fifth episode, Rick (Goggins) rolls up to Bangkok to reunite with his old friend Frank (Rockwell), acquire a handgun, and pursue the person who killed his father. But the transaction quickly devolves into a trauma dump when Frank reveals the true, hedonistic nature of his time in Thailand. Over a few uninterrupted minutes, he chronicles the twisted details of his former sexual deviancy, shares an existential awakening about his own race and gender, and explains how the experiences forced him to embrace a Buddhist lifestyle of sobriety and detachment. Rick can only sit in stunned silence.
Rockwell’s sordid but sincere monologue—and his dynamic, unpredictable presence over three more episodes—earned immediate buzz online, spawned plenty of memes (mostly from Goggins’ incredulous expressions at Rockwell’s litany of perversities), and crystallized the season’s exploration of the theme of enlightenment. A couple months removed from the show’s finale, Rockwell hopped on the phone during his recent, bicoastal press tour to unpack that monologue, working opposite Goggins, and joining White’s circus.
GQ: What was your initial discussion like with Mike about taking this role, especially with the time commitment?
Sam Rockwell: Yeah, it was only two-and-a-half, three weeks, but it was more about how to approach the role and if I could get off book with the monologue and stuff like that—and just that fear of sucking.
You still have that fear, this late in your career?
Oh, yeah. I pride myself on my preparation time, and so you just don’t want to shortchange that because then you don’t have to think about acting. You just show up. If you show up prepared, you do less acting. You live it a little more and it’s more fun that way.
When you read the script for the first time, and started talking with Mike about it, what was your reaction to the monologue?
Well, it had the shock value. I’d been sort of prepped on it a little bit, so I was expecting something weird. But it was really cool and I dug it. It was really more about making the rest of the part work, you know? The rest of the part needed some finessing. The monologue was pretty much intact the way it was when I read it. That was less of the issue aside from the memorization, and I didn’t have a lot of time. You want to have like three months for a two-and-a-half page monologue, and I had about four to six weeks maybe. That wasn’t really ideal in order to know it—and then really know it.
Do you start with memorization first, or from a character perspective and get that part down?
I do both at the same time. I just do the mechanical part of it, which is memorizing by rote. And then I work on it with an acting coach. If I have a dialect, I work on dialect or if there’s research that needs to be done. In this case, I’d researched most aspects of the character for other movies, like sex addiction, expat stuff—I’d already done that. The sober aspect—I’d done a movie called Drunks where I went to AA meetings, NA meetings. And so Buddhism was really the only thing I didn’t really know about. So I watched some documentaries and read a little bit about that and learned how to pray and stuff like that.
Did you also know anyone in your sphere, or lean on any specific pop cultural references, to help you understand this kind of guy better?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Well, I’m very much a film nerd. So I draw from lots of films or documentaries. I think Apocalypse Now was coming to mind. But there’s a danger with the monologue that you might do it like the Dennis Hopper character in Apocalypse Now. And I think, actually, in reading it more and more, I realized that it had to be more like the Martin Sheen character, or the Brando character. You know what I mean? Because the monologue is already just fucking wild. The exterior is more masculine, more conservative. And [the idea was] to juxtapose the inward femininity of the monologue.
And there was a kind of a presumption in the script that Walt and I had sketchy backgrounds—that we had maybe been ex-military and that I’d give him a gun and we might have been mercenaries. You just don’t know. So I got a Navy SEAL tattoo on my forearm and they put some scars on my face and I shaved my head. I was kind of lean at the time, and I thought that that would be a good juxtaposition to Walt, who had long hair. We were well-matched for that. Mike White does a very clever thing with that monologue. He encapsulates the entire season with it and this character—the conflict between our tendency to be selfish and our search for spirituality. He kind of brings what the season’s all about to a head.
Yeah, because you’re talking about getting off the never-ending carousel of lust and suffering.
Yes, that’s right.
You mentioned your acting coach. I read that Terry Knickerbocker helped you with this a bit and that you used the Meisner technique. What about that method is helpful for you and how did you end up using it for something like this?
The Meisner technique is a very practical technique to work on text and it just provides you with a vocabulary to your toolbox. And so if you’re doing Shakespeare, for example, it’s like another language so you might have to paraphrase—what we call “what ifs.” The Meisner technique is more about the “what if,” not so much the “what happened.” Strasburg, which is known as The Method, is more about emotional memory, sense memory, which is real experiences from the past that actors actually had and calling upon trauma for an emotional prep before you enter a scene. Whereas Meisner argues that you can’t draw upon your real life all the time because a lot of the stuff that your characters do, you’ve never done. You have to use your imagination. That’s more about the “what if,” the fantasizing and the daydreaming. But that’s a big part of any acting.
What do you daydream and imagine for something like this? What helps you get into a character who’s got this bizarre sexual predilection?
I mean, I think that we’ve all had fantasies about things. And I think that in this case, the guy is a Buddhist. He’s a recovering sex addict and a substance abuser. And ex-military. A lot of things that I’m not. The biggest thing was the enlightenment of the speech. And that’s the thing that Terry and I worked on. For some reason, there was a tendency to be depressive with it. And that was the wrong way to go, I think. And I kept instinctively wanting to go in that direction because maybe there’s trauma there. But the whole point of the monologue is that he’s enlightened now. So it’s actually a very positive monologue. That was the danger. Those were the traps.
And in that sense, it really is like the Dennis Hopper monologue in Apocalypse Now. He is saying, “Hey, man, this is the answer. I found the answer to life, and it’s not easy, but this is the road I went down. Let me tell you something about it.” And so I guess whatever that was in my life, or whatever I think that could be in my life, I would fantasize about that. And the closest I’ve had to enlightenment is any kind of endorphin you would get from being on stage or doing something in a film where you have a revelation—you’re doing a scene and you can’t stop crying. Stuff like that.
That’s a very important part of it. I couldn’t do the monologue without Walt. Walt is my tennis player.
Yeah. How helpful was it to have a friend opposite you the whole time?
Oh, incredibly helpful. We’ve been friends for such a long time. and we were playing friends in the show. And, you know, Walt and I have seen things in real life that I wouldn’t even know if it really happened unless I called Walt and said, “Hey, did that really happen?” And he would say, “Yeah, dude, that really happened.”
Do you have an example of that?
I couldn’t tell you, or then I’d have to kill you [laughs]. Just crazy shit that we’ve been through over the past ever since we met on Cowboys and Aliens. We were in a helicopter and later had margaritas with Harrison Ford! And we’re like, “Wait did that really happen? Did we just fucking fly in a helicopter with Han Solo?” Shit like that. Rick and Frank have that similar thing—this kind of Butch/Sundance thing with the two of them. And I knew immediately that Walt and I would have that innately. And I think Mike knew it and Leslie knew it. And so that was very helpful. And then I could make him laugh. He could make me laugh at any given moment. I didn’t ad lib, and it wasn’t used. But at one point, I’m saying goodbye to him. I said, “You got my number?” He says, “Yeah.” I said, “Lose it.” And he started laughing. Having Walt there was essential.
Well, his reactions to this monologue add so much humor to the scene. Did you recognize how much that would impact the reaction to it? The coverage of him produced lots of meme material right away.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, the monologue is very funny. I recently went to a thing and they were screening the monologue and it was getting a lot of laughs. I was like, “Oh yeah, this thing’s funny.” It is. I mean, I knew that, but kind of nervous laughter, too, you know? I think it makes people uncomfortable.
How many attempts did you get for it on set that day?
Well, I joked with Mike White and the producers that I might possibly need an earwig, a teleprompter kind of thing, because I was fearful that I wouldn’t know the lines. But Leslie came to visit me on the other movie and drilled me on the lines and ran them over and over again on Safari in Africa. They did have an earwig prepped, but I never needed it. I did the first take in one take in a close-up. Mike asked if I wanted the close-up or the wide shot first, and I said, “Let’s do the close-up.” I wanted to keep it fresh for everybody because there’s a sense of performance for the crew and for Walt and I wanted the freshness to be on my close-up so that I was experiencing the monologue, because he’s revealing this really secret part of himself and it should be a little scary and confessional. If we’d done it the other way around, it just would have been stale and boring, you know? But I wanted it to be a little dangerous and scary in my close-up. It’s all about the camera.
I’m trying to envision you watching gorillas on some safari as you’re thinking about this monologue.
Well, it was elephants and leopards and hyenas and lions. But yeah! She was helping me while looking at animals [laughs].
How difficult was it to kind of keep this under wraps?
I’m shocked that it didn’t get out. I’m fucking shocked. They said they were going to keep it a secret, and I was like, “Yeah, right.” And I thought for sure I’d end up on the poster or something. I was like, “Yeah, OK.” But we had a rider contract written into it. I think it served them better. I think they wanted it to be a surprise. There was more hype that way. There was a good strategy.
Did you know that this was going to be a bigger role beyond the monologue, or did it start to develop more as you worked with the character and Mike saw what you were providing?
No, it was all there on the page. We changed some of the stuff. I pitched a bar fight that we shot where I defend this trans waitress, a “lady boy” being hassled by these Russian guys. And we got into a bar fight, and I beat up these guys. We choreographed it, shot it, and then it was cut. But it probably didn’t belong in the show.