Sam Nivola on playing a ​“nervous, awkward, virginal teenager”

Sam Nivola is ​“really young”. He reiterates this himself several times over the course of our interview and for the most part, he’s right. He was born in 2003, the year Where is the Love? by The Black Eyed Peas topped the charts and Finding Nemo came out. Still, his CV is pretty stacked.

In 2022, Sam starred alongside Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig in Noach Baumbach’s White Noise. A year after that, he was in Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro and made an appearance in Eileen with Anne Hathaway, the adaptation of Otessa Moshfegh’s acclaimed novel. In 2025 – how did we get here so fast? – Sam will appear in every actor’s favourite get: the next season of The White Lotus.

Today, the fresh-faced actor calls in from a hotel room in Los Angeles, ahead of the premiere for his latest gig, Netflix’s buzzy satirical whodunnit, The Perfect Couple – this time alongside none other than Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber.

In the show, Sam plays Will Winbury, the youngest of three brothers in a moneyed family who are all attending his brother Benji’s wedding in Nantucket, Massachusetts. It’s all pristine tennis courts and champagne towers until the guests learn that the maid of honour (played by Meghann Fahy) has been murdered on the beach. Like many of Sam’s previous roles, Will Winbury is a ​“nervous, awkward, virginal teenager,” as he puts it.

Famous co-stars aside, he’s unlikely to get starstruck – after all, his parents Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer are both actors who’ve given him good advice on not getting swept up by the movie biz.

“My parents always tell me to make sure you stay close to your friends from high school who aren’t actors and stay interested in things like books and music and cooking,” Sam says. ​“I think it’s probably a lot easier to get wrapped up in being surrounded by people who ​‘love’ you if you surround yourself with those people. I try to diversify who my friends are.” Wise words.

Hey Sam! How did you get into acting?

When I was probably 14 or 15, [I was like] I don’t have enough friends so I’m going to become a pretentious recluse and get a Criterion Channel subscription which made me just completely fall in love with old movies. I like watching Italian neo-realism movies because my dad is half-Italian and I’ve got family there, but that was my way into everything.

Did you manage to make more friends after the Criterion Channel subscription?

Sort of. I started dating a girl who dressed like a goth witch and we would go to the Film Forum cinema all the time. That was cool.

What was your style like at the time?

I was dressed like a French mime. But I’ve always had two close friends who I did everything with. Now I run a production company with one of them, so it’s very full circle in that sense.

Tell us more…

Despite acting being a sort of flashy job, it really limits your creative control – I’ve seen this a lot with my parents – and it also limits your ability to work. It places all the control in the hands of people who are directors, writers and producers. So having a production company means that if you want to play a role, you can write it yourself. And it gives you something to do when you aren’t acting.

What sort of roles would you like to play that you haven’t had the chance to yet?

I’d love to play like the tough guy at some point!

You’re in the next season of The White Lotus, how was it to film that?

Mike White, the writer and director, is just a genius who made me feel so safe and comfortable. It’s the biggest role I’ve ever had and it’s the biggest show I’ve ever done. We shot it in Thailand for seven months, and I was there with no connection to the outside world, which was really scary. But creatively, it was very fulfilling to be able to have a role that’s big enough to really sink your teeth into. It was once in a lifetime.