Sarah Catherine Hook Knows She’s Your Girl

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.

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.”