The White Lotus: Does Mia Really Believe “The Best Things In Life Are Free?”

You’re an integral part of the cast, right? You’re absolutely necessary. And I love, I love that you just said about, um, Mia being sort of like an innocent girl, at least at first and whatnot. In the first episode, you throw a drink at the hotel pianist, because he insinuates that you’re a sex worker. She’s sort of wrestling with what she has to do to sort of get ahead. She says, I’m, you know, “I’m a singer, I’m not a prostitute.” Can you tell me a little bit about that sort of juxtaposition? There’s the two forces within her that are at odds.

Yeah, but there is something about it that is quite funny. I think Mike White kind of made that up while we were working together, like, this joke about my character, that every time I kind of open up, like, “I want to be a singer, that’s my dream.” And on the other side, people, like, misunderstands it and they go, “So you want to have sex?” Like, “Oh. You’re this happy because of this?” And she goes, “No, I’m just being open. You know, and I’m smiling and you’re the piano guy, not because I want to have sex with you, but because you’re a musician. And I want to be that too.” And, and I think the thing is, like, you know when you want something really bad, then you become so clumsy because you want to get there and you don’t think. You’re just like, “Maybe I can do this, this and this.” And then while you do it, you just, you know, you tear everything apart and, like, Mia will do so many mess, so much mess. And it’s like, she’s clumsy and she doesn’t really know. Like, she just wants to play the piano. You know?

I was so happy to see in this episode, you and Lucia, when you, when you got in, when you had that scene with Valentina and she was so mad, you know? Can you talk to me about that? Like, Valentina, the relationship between Mia and Lucia and Valentina and sort of, you know, you know, Lucia even says, like, “Hey, you’re a working girl, we’re working girls, we’re all working here.”

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. That’s the thing. And it’s, it’s fun because there’s never judgment about it, you know? What’s the word? How do you call it? Do you say ba- baby squillo? No, in English, we say-

Ooh, tell me. I took Italian for a minute. So maybe I know this word.

I don’t know how to say in English. But you know, like, you see a young girl, like, and she’s a prostitute and you go like, “Aw, poor little girl. She’s a victim. And blah, blah, blah.” But they, they just don’t care. And the thing is like, there’s no judgment whatsoever. They just, it’s a game. They’re like, “We’re going to do this. They’re rich people, we are, like, you know.” It’s fun. It’s just, and it’s a comedy, you know? Thing is, thing about this show is that it’s a comedy and it, it has so much deep, deep thoughts into it, but at the end, like, like, you know, we, we just want to have fun and we just want to entertain and I think it’s… It was great. It was just great to play that character.