Sarah Catherine Hook thought Mike White was playing games with her.
After an initial audition for the third season of The White Lotus—for which White is the sole creator, director, and writer—Hook had a callback with him. She had next to zero context aside from her character’s name and some lines. “Going into it, I thought it was gonna be a really intense callback,” she tells me over Zoom a week before this season’s premiere. “We’re gonna have big philosophical talks about the role of Piper, and I really have to be on my shit for this girl!” But when White arrived on the call, she felt the stress slightly deflate as he sat there on the screen grinning at her.
“Mike was like, ‘Heeeeeeey, what’s up?’ It was so casual, as if we were out getting lunch or something,” she says. “He kept being like, ‘Where are you?’ or ‘How was your Christmas?’ and then ‘Listen, I loved your tapes. You’re great! Let’s just do the scene, and if I have any notes, I’ll give them to you. But like, I don’t know… I think you’re great.'” Hook sat in disbelief before doing the scene, and the callback was over shortly after. “Usually, that’s a bad sign. I thought, ‘I’m so confused. What just happened?’ That was the weirdest audition I’ve ever had,” she continues.
It’s funny to hear from Hook that she felt unprepared for how uninhibited White ended up being because I quickly felt the same about her. She took our call from her bed, wearing a white pointelle set and fixing loose strands of her messy bun. Before I can even introduce myself, she lunges into an apology for her setting before thrusting her arms out and expressing her excitement for our chat. “I thought, ‘Let’s just get into it!'” she says. Hook has the kind of unjaded enthusiasm that feels increasingly rare in this industry. Within minutes of meeting her, you get the sense that she is always doing the work because she just genuinely loves it. It’s her job as much as it is her life.
