Sarah Catherine Hook On Becoming Piper for The White Lotus

Sarah Catherine Hook for Who What Wear's In Focus feature.

(Image credit: Nori Rasmussen; Styling: Prada tights, bandeau, belt, and shoes)

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.

Sarah Catherine Hook quote for Who What Wear's In Focus feature.

Hook describes herself as "an original fan" of the show. She tells me she watched it right as it aired before the hype and was instantly taken by it—as were the over nine million other initial viewers. Having the audition for Piper Ratliff, the middle child of a wealthy Southern family vacationing at the White Lotus in Thailand, land in her inbox was already a win in her eyes. "I'm actually someone who really loves auditioning. I don't get like that whole, 'Oh, I have to audition—how horrible! How dare they ask me to audition!' I'm one of the rare ones who … could audition for a living. I mean, I do! I was just so excited to hit this one and do it," she says.

But this audition felt different in many ways. "There was a lot of initial talk about Mike really liking my tapes and my look for the part," Hook says. "I just started to really feel like I was the girl. But then it was so torturous because we didn't hear anything for a month and a half, and I thought, 'What is going on?' I was just spiraling out for some reason because I thought, 'Why is he playing this game with me?'"

The time between Hook's initial audition and the call with White felt like an eternity. When the highly anticipated final step she was agonizing over felt so casual and quick, she found herself suddenly panicked. She got whiplash. "The next day after Zooming with Mike, I got the call that I got the part. I thought, 'Why was that so easy and also so painful?'" Hook says. To celebrate, she decided to watch School of Rock, which White wrote and starred in as Ned Schneebly, with her family. "It was a wholesome time," she laughs.

Even after getting the role, Hook had this lingering feeling that maybe she was being punked. She always felt she was Piper, but the more she got to know her, the more she started to feel freaked out by their similarities. She says, "I'm from Alabama. Piper and I are both Southern girls. I am the middle child between two brothers in real life. I grew up in the church. I went off to college, had kind of a new experience, and that was my first introduction to Buddhism."

As we've seen in the first few episodes of the third season, Piper hopes to interview a local Buddhist monk for her college thesis. Her family supports her academic pursuits of a religion that isn't their own but only to an extent. "I was required to read an Eckhart Tolle book in college, and I remember going home and being like, 'Guys, Buddhism is the way.' My mom was like, 'But what about Jesus?' She was freaking out, and it's just funny because, when I read the script with Piper, I felt like I was reading about my younger self, my past self," Hook says.

To play what felt like a fantastical version of herself for one of the most popular shows on television (season three has surpassed 10 million viewers in the first week, doubling last season, which had doubled the one before) was equal parts thrilling and terrifying. "I find spirituality to be a very personal thing," she says. "It was a little bit vulnerable for me to go down that path because I had also just had a pretty intense spiritual awakening not even a month before I got the audition. The timing of it was super weird but exciting. I decided, 'I'm just gonna run with this.' Imagine me being like, 'No, I don't want to test my limits because it's too close to home!' Absolutely not."

Hook is quick to note that the role she played right before The White Lotus—Caroline Merteuil on Prime Video's television reboot of Cruel Intentions—couldn't have been further from both Piper's reality and her own. "I went from being this blonde bombshell in six-inch platform heels to playing this very pure, spiritual seeking, Buddhist monk girlie! It was a complete 180," she says.

She feels fortunate to have always played different characters in her career so far ("I don't feel like I'm ever playing the same character twice, which is really fun for me"), but she's also never had to become someone else so quickly. She was only in Los Angeles for five days after wrapping Cruel Intentions before boarding the plane for Thailand. "My characters for Cruel Intentions and The White Lotus were so close they were, like, kissing! They were making out!" she says. "And I'm like, 'Ah! You're so different!' Even the looks! I was like, 'I don't even recognize myself!'"

On that plane to Thailand, Hook decided to start getting in character. She had been getting into the late acting coach William Esper's teachings and brought his second book, The Actor's Guide to Creating a Character, for the long trip over. "He wrote about the actress Laurette Taylor. People didn't really understand her for a long time because she was way ahead of her time, acting style–wise," she explains. "Back in the day, everyone was very melodramatic. She was raw and real. Apparently … in every rehearsal, she would just observe every single person. She would take in every little mannerism and idiosyncrasy from each person. She would take in their real personalities and their characters." Hook pulled from that, determined to become a true observer. "I wanted to observe everyone around me and even the people who I might not be acting with. I just want to soak in whatever they're doing and let that inform Piper and myself," she says.

It was another one of those magical coincidences she kept confronting. "It kind of worked weirdly because Piper is a quiet observer," she says. "I feel like Esper's teachings correlate really well with her Buddhist mentality." Hook even took up meditation while on location. "It might not have done anything specific for my performance, but I think for me and my own state of mind, I had to feel that I was putting in the work and taking care. That's just as important to me as, like, if it even does affect the actual outcome. You want to feel like you're doing the work," she says.

When Hook talks about Piper, she refers to her like she is her own entity—alive but out of sight. She could be simply sitting in another room. "On my last day of filming with her, I bawled my eyes out," she says. "That girl and I went through a lot together! My heart goes out to that precious, precious baby. I love her so much. I'm very glad I got to play her." Hook didn't just become Piper; she created her and then set her free.

Now that they've parted ways, Hook, who studied vocal performance and opera at SUNY Purchase, has her sights set on theater. "I want to use my voice. I would love to have a singing role soon," she says. "The indies with a lot of heart … those are also my jam right now! But honestly, just anything with interesting characters." Up next, she has the highly anticipated film adaptation of Emily Henry's romance novel People We Meet on Vacation.

As Hook's Piper quickly becomes a fan favorite week over week on The White Lotus, it's not hard to imagine just how many interesting characters are already in her future. It feels likely that she'll just have to get used to the games directors will want to play with her—the kind where they just meet her and instantly know that she's their girl.