Last year, the Italian actress Sabrina Impacciatore moved to Studio City, Calif. After years of career instability, she had arrived in this safe, sun-soaked harbor with a starring role on “The Paper,” the highly anticipated spinoff of the beloved 2000s mockumentary series “The Office.” And for the first two weeks of shooting, Impacciatore cried every night.
Some of those tears were terror-driven. She worried, as she often worries, that she couldn’t deliver what the part demanded. But mostly these were tears of gratitude.
“I was thanking God for all these unbelievable dreams coming true,” she said, hand on heart.
I could believe it. During a tranquil afternoon passed at the Studio City farmers’ market and an adjoining cafe, Impacciatore cried at least three times. “I’m sorry,” she said, dabbing her eyes after one jag. “No, it’s crazy. I’m so open, all my chakras are open. I don’t know why I’m like this.”
To spend a few hours with Impacciatore, 57, is to ride a hang-on-to-your-hats-and-glasses emotional roller coaster, whooshing from despair to astonishment to joy, often in the same breath. She had chosen the farmers’ market because she found it soothing.
“I used to come to relax because the shooting was very, very intense,” she said. “So to take a walk here in the morning was really helpful.”
Moving among the stalls in an embroidered white blouse and white jeans — a brave choice for a tomato-based activity — she was not exactly relaxed. (Or maybe this was her relaxed, which was saying something.) She sampled stone fruit; she bought vegetables. She rattled off a recipe for ravioli: “You add Parmesan, and then you cry.”
Then she shoved a bundle of basil in my face. “Smell it!” she said. “Isn’t it so good?”
I agreed that it was. Because it did smell nice — like licorice and earth and summertime — and also because these days, Impacciatore is not a woman to be denied. Following a nearly 40-year career in Italian television and movies, she charmed an enormous new audience with a memorable turn as an uptight hotelier in the second season of the HBO resort dramedy “The White Lotus,” in 2022. Now, with “The Paper” set to debut its 10-episode first season on Peacock on Sept. 4, she seems poised to become a star in America.
“She’s just this incredible talent,” Mike White, the creator of “The White Lotus,” said.
Impacciatore has always had big feelings and big dreams. She grew up in Rome, and when she was 8, she wrote in her diary, “One day I’ll be an actress and my life will be a movie.” At 16, she apprenticed with a local theater company, and at 18 she became a member, even as she pursued a more practical degree in marketing and communications. Acting to her meant freedom, possibility.
“Also it’s like taking a drug that brings me far away from pain,” she said.
She studied with a visiting coach from the Actors Studio, the New York-based school of Method acting, cleaning toilets to afford the lessons. One day, the coach had her perform an improvisation. The other students laughed, which surprised her — she’d thought the scene was serious. But she did not mind it. “Because laughter is love,” she said. She was, she now understood, a comedian.
She began to go out on auditions and meet with casting directors. Many of them criticized her looks, she said, telling her that she would never make it. But a director took a chance on her and gave her a slot on a TV show where she could improvise comedy routines and parodies.
The next decades were professionally erratic. She did mostly comedies and a few dramas. (She had a brief scene in “The Passion of the Christ,” famously not a comedy.) Some years, she barely worked at all.
“They called me only when they thought that nobody else could play that role,” she said.
She has had opportunities to break into America before, including a time in the early 2000s when, she said, she scored an audition for “The Sopranos” but never showed up for it. She was in a relationship at the time that she did not believe would survive long distance. (“To me, love, it’s at first place,” she said.) More than a decade later, when a new love brought her back to California, she took some meetings, “but it didn’t go well,” she said. “So I thought ‘OK, this is not going to happen.’”
Then, while she was shooting a movie in the north of Italy, her agent called. “The White Lotus” planned to shoot its second season in Sicily and was seeking local actors. Could she put herself on tape? Impacciatore had not seen the show. (She is too busy, she said, to watch much TV.) But she binged the first season in a night and decided that she must work with White.
On the strength of her tape, White invited her for a callback, during which she told him that she had put a curse on him so he must cast her, he said. (Impacciatore disputes this, but only lightly: “I have no memory. Sometimes I do things. I don’t know who I am.”) White wasn’t sure he could handle that kind of energy, but after another offer fell through, he cast her anyway. The curse worked.
“I was completely bewitched by her,” White said. “There’s a vulnerability to her. She definitely takes over a room, but she is watching everybody’s reaction. There’s this slight neurotic quality to her; your heart goes out to her.”
Impacciatore played Valentina, the buttoned-up resort manager. (Late in the season, Valentina … unbuttons.) She was terrified by the role, she said, mostly because Murray Bartlett, who played a similar part in the first season of the show, had been so excellent. She put a lot of that terror into Valentina, a queer woman who must repress her outsize feelings and emotions.
The season was a success and so was Impacciatore, who was nominated for an Emmy Award. (She lost to her co-star Jennifer Coolidge.) Suddenly she was in demand for English-language projects, such as the action comedy “G20,” which came out in April. And she is now often recognized, which has felt gratifying but also limiting.
“I’m very wild,” she said. “I have a free spirit, so with my personality, to be recognized is not exactly a goal.” Still, she enjoys the adulation: “It’s all about love.”
As she was preparing to fly home to Rome from the “G20” shoot, her agent phoned to tell her about “The Paper,” a spinoff of the American “Office” by Greg Daniels, a creator of the original, and Michael Koman, who helped create the absurdist stunt comedy “Nathan for You.”
Impacciatore had never seen “The Office,” but she watched several episodes on the plane. A day or two later, she logged onto a video to audition to play Esmeralda, the devious, vain managing editor of The Toledo Truth Teller and a single mother. “Not that you would know it,” Esmeralda writes of herself in an editorial. “Because her body is insane.”
Impacciatore hadn’t had enough time to learn the scenes in English, so she mostly ad-libbed. (“Is that what they do in Italy?” Daniels asked Koman at one point.) They asked her to audition again, with the actual lines, and the role was hers.
Impacciatore was grateful. And fearful. As she had worried about Bartlett, she also worried that she would never fill the loafers of Steve Carell, who had played the oblivious boss on “The Office.” So she flew to New York City, where Carell was starring in a production of “Uncle Vanya,” and arrived backstage, shaking. Carell comforted her and told her she would be fine. (In an email, Carell said Impacciatore was “incredibly gracious. What a kind, wonderful person.”)
“That was a very precious little thing,” she said. Then she moved to California and the crying began.
Her first scene in the show was not meant to be a scene at all. Impacciatore, in makeup and costume, came on to set to feel her way around. Daniels filmed her asking which camera she should look at and suggesting adjustments to the lights. It worked for the mockumentary style of “The Paper,” even as Impacciatore was panicking inside.
“I couldn’t understand the language because they were speaking very, very fast.” she said. “I thought: ‘I’m never going to make it. It’s impossible I make it; I do not get what they’re saying.’” But the scene was too funny to cut.
On set, Impacciatore impressed Koman with her emotional intelligence. “She really liked the character being extreme,” Koman said in a phone interview. “But she makes choices based on what she thinks would be truthful as a character. If there isn’t some emotional truth to it, it looks very awkward in a documentary setting.”
Sometimes truth means deciding to do the worm in one of Esmeralda’s typically maximalist outfits. Chelsea Frei, her co-star, recalled seeing her in the makeup trailer the next day, bandaged and bruised. “She just committed herself so hard to that moment, and it was so worth it,” Frei said.
Daniels was dazzled by this gift for physical comedy as well as her spontaneity. “It’s very exciting — you’re not 100 percent sure what she’s going to do,” he said. The finished show includes many of her improvisations, like a scene in which Esmeralda gives herself a face-lift using office tape. “She’s a great clown,” Daniels said.
But she is a clown who takes clowning seriously. She worries about each ad lib. She worries that people will not like Esmeralda, who is mean and manipulative, with a psychotic fashion sense. But Impacciatore sympathizes with her.
“She has to make it here in the U.S., and she would do anything to stay,” she said.
Impacciatore is not so desperate, though she did tell me several times that “The Paper” is her “incredible American dream.” For now, she is splitting her time between Rome, where her family lives, and Los Angeles, the home of the show and a new love. Every time she leaves Italy she cries. When she leaves California she cries, too. But these are happy tears.
“In this moment, I feel, ‘Sabrina, of course this is happening,’” Impacciatore said, wiping her eyes again. “You gave love to love; you gave love to acting; you have been faithful to yourself. And now everything is showing up.”
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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