Sabrina Impacciatore Made Up A Backstory For Valentina In The White Lotus Season 2
This post contains spoilers for "The White Lotus" season 2, episode 6.
The latest episode of "The White Lotus" season 2 is a major breakthrough for Valentina, played by the Italian actress Sabrina Impacciatore. Viewers finally learned a little more about the rigid hotel manager on her birthday. Valentina always tells everyone what not to do, so it's refreshing to see her let loose a little bit. She is particularly frigid towards men, in part because they seem to always be hitting on the girl she is interested in. Impacciatore imagines that Valentina's relationship with men goes much deeper than just being queer. In fact, the actress invented an entire backstory for her character that further explains her behavior.
On her first day on set, Impacciatore felt totally underprepared. "I never talked with [series creator] Mike [White]," she revealed to Vulture. "Like, we never rehearsed. So I arrived to the first day of shooting terrified because I didn't know what he wanted from this character." Ultimately she felt like the series creator was projecting a shallow and alien character onto her, one that she couldn't relate to:
"Through my character, he wanted to tell this story about his own experience traveling in Europe, when he met someone who didn't treat him in a way he was expecting."
Impacciatore had trouble relating to Valentina because she didn't feel sympathy for her. "[White] told me, 'Sabrina, you have to be more bitchy!' And I didn't get it right away," she admitted. Impacciatore was hesitant to play an unlikable character. "I was scared that people could hate me," the actress explained. "It's my first American show, a huge show in America; I was excited and I was terrified!"
Eventually, the actress developed her own backstory for Valentina to provide the character with emotional depth.
Valentina had a troubled marriage
Valentina really started to flourish in Season 2 of "The White Lotus" when Impacciatore began working on the character privately. "I made up her backstory on my own and I didn't even share it with Mike," she admitted.
"I'm an actress who really needs to feel things. I don't act, I live things, and the only thing in the script was that Valentina was married many years ago. With the editing, that information is not there anymore, so I created the story of an abusive relationship. I imagined her at home, not having a real life, not having friends, very lonely."
There was one scene that remained in the series that says a lot about who Valentina is. "So, the scene with the kittens helped me a lot because I thought, Valentina loves these kittens so much because she's not at ease with human beings," the actress recalled.
Her character's suppressed sexuality creates tension with women, and her tension with men is further explained by the abusive relationship. Since Valentina reveals in episode 6 that she's never been with a woman, we know this abusive marriage must have been with a man. Still, Impacciatore believes her motivations are totally subconscious. "Valentina doesn't even know why she treats men badly," she explained. "She just feels uncomfortable ... to me, that was surprisingly innocent."
This combination of innocence and isolation in Valentina motivates her growing crush on Isabella. "She feels seen for the first time, and so she gets attached to the first person that pays attention to her," Impacciatore said. When Isabella rejects Valentina in episode 6 and reveals her engagement to Rocco, it drives Valentina right into Lucia's waiting arms.
Inventing a backstory helped Impacciatore act
Lucia and Valentina hook up in a touchingly intimate scene in episode 6 of "The White Lotus" Season 2. Valentina admits to Lucia that she has never been with a woman before in a rare moment of vulnerability. Impacciatore felt a lot of compassion for Valentina in that moment. "That day, when I shot the scene where I say, 'I've never been with a woman before,' I remember what I felt," the actress told Variety. "I was not acting, I was living the conflict of this character in a very deep way. It made me understand, 'How do people that don't accept themselves live their lives?'"
Her sympathy for Valentina left her deeply affected. "After that scene, I cried for half an hour," Impacciatore recalled. "In Italy, to be gay is still a big issue. They don't have rights in Italy. They cannot get married, they cannot have kids. And sometimes they get attacked in the streets just because they love someone of their own sex... so this scene was a deep experience for me."
Being gay in Italy is a conflict unto itself, but the additional tragic backstory of an abusive relationship allowed Impacciatore to truly see her character as a three-dimensional being. White's writing may have fallen a little flat for the actress at first, but eventually, the pair worked together to develop Valentina. "He wanted to explore with me," she recalled. At the end of filming her emotional scene in episode 6, she was grateful for his direction, and he was grateful for her performance. "I jumped into Mike's arms and told him, 'I love you! Thank you!'" she recalled. "And he said, 'Sabrina ... It's you who is doing these things.' And I told him, 'I'm doing these things because of you. And I'm understanding more about life because of you.'"