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Will Sharpe can do it all. We need a new, less pretentious term for multihyphenate, we really do. (I thesaurus.com’d it and there wasn’t so much as a single alternative.) Still, Sharpe is every bit a textbook multihyphenate — working as an actor, writer and director — who achieved worldwide recognition for his role as Ethan, the reserved tech bro, on the latest season of The White Lotus. I’ll admit, I was unfamiliar with Sharpe before TWL put me on to both his talents and his physique. But now, late to the party but happy to be here, I can confirm that his back catalog is well worth the deep dive.

He began his career on the BBC medical drama Casualty before quickly adding director to his quill with Black Pond, a black comedy in which a family is accused of murder after a stranger comes to dinner. The film earned him and co-director Tom Kingsley a BAFTA nomination for the Outstanding British Debut Award. He garnered acclaim for his 2016 series Flowers, another black comedy that follows the four eccentric members of the Flowers family as they navigate their lives together and their own inner demons, which ran for two seasons and saw him writing, directing and acting opposite Academy Award-winner Olivia Colman — who would go on to become a frequent collaborator.

In the last three years, Sharpe has bounced from one hit to the next. First, he won a BAFTA Television Award for his supporting role as Rodney Yamaguchi in BBC drama Giri/Haji in 2020. Then, in 2021, he directed and co-wrote the biographical comedy-drama film The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. In 2022 came The White Lotus. Recently, it was announced that he will next direct the film adaptation of Japanese Breakfast frontwoman Michelle Zauner’s New York Times-bestselling memoir, Crying in H Mart.

And though he inspired much intrigue from audiences engulfed in White Lotus mania, he’s remained a relatively low-profile presence. He doesn’t have social media and grants few interviews, allowing the art to exist ahead of the artist. Shrewd, if you ask me. As such, he wasn’t an easy interview to get, and I’m incredibly grateful that after meeting him in Paris at a Loewe after party and then seeing him again in London at a Kim Jones party, we finally had the opportunity to go deep.

I believe that you just got back from Tokyo a few weeks ago, if I recall correctly from when you and I bumped into each other a few weeks ago in London. You had just gotten back, and it was from your grandmother meeting your kids for the first time, right?

That's right! She's 97, and both of our kids were born in the Covid era and it was very hard to get back to Japan during that time. So this was the first time she’d met our three-year-old and our one-year-old, so it was really lovely.

I can imagine! Did you have a nice trip there overall?

Yeah! It's funny ‘cause I lived there until I was 8, so there's a layer of nostalgia that is sort of unlocked when I go back there and realize there are things there that are missing in other parts of the world; even just things like the 7-Elevens and the corner shops, the convenience stores and the weird snacks that you can get. All of those things are very nostalgic for me, and it's weird ‘cause if you’re mixed race or somebody who grew up in different parts of the world, there's a part of you that sort of feels a little bit like you're not really sure where your home is or where you're supposed to settle. And that's one way of looking at it, but another, more positive way of thinking about it is that you can kind of slot in and find a sense of belonging wherever you are, and that felt especially true for me in Tokyo. 

You're directing the film adaptation of Michelle Zauner’s 2021 memoir, Crying in H Mart. It's described as “a coming-of-age story about a half-Korean daughter who returns to small-town Oregon to care for her Korean mother, depicting Chongmi and Michelle's relationship as they learn to see and accept one another through the formative power of music and the vibrant flavors of Korean cooking.” What first attracted you to this book and then later gave you the instinct to want to interpret it in film?

Well, I was a fan of Japanese Breakfast already. I wasn't aware, though, of the backstory for [their] album Psychopomp, so I was curious to read the book and was kind of blown away by it. It's a very personal story. It goes to some heavy places, but she writes in such an elegant, light-handed way. I just felt like it was a very moving and relatable story. There were lots of different ways in for me: There are passages in it where she talks about being jet-lagged with her mom in Korea, and sneaking into the kitchen and having midnight snacks, and all of that was just vividly relatable to me. I could picture being in my own grandma's kitchen and being like, “Why am I awake at 4am? What's in this fridge?” [Chuckles] When you're signing onto a project, you want to feel that it excites you, but also that you have something to offer and that you are the right person for it, too. I felt like I would be able to bring something to it because I really felt like I understood what [Michelle] was trying to say. But it is such a big responsibility because it’s a really personal story for Michelle and I think that's going to be the big thing for us both: keeping that chemistry and being honest and supportive of each other throughout. So I'm excited to be getting stuck into that for sure.

People really lit up at the announcement of this project. It's obviously a beloved book; I believe it spent 60+ weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, just to give people a scope of how beloved this book is. I think Michelle’s involvement in this is particularly exciting because sometimes, certain people's stories are told without their consent. For instance, Pamela Anderson on the Hulu series Pam & Tommy, where she openly expresses the fact that the story was being told without her consent. I think it's a terrific thing when the author of anything deeply personal is involved in the adaptation of their work.

It’s special. 

I recently rewatched your performance in Giri/Haji, a 2019 BBC Two London/Tokyo thriller. Your performance as Rodney, who's a rent boy, is absolutely incredible. I particularly loved that scene on the subway with Taki when she reaches over and grabs your hand. I found that really, really affecting and just so beautiful. What initially attracted you to that project?

I love Joe Barton’s writing. He wrote all 10 episodes. And I love the character of Rodney. I guess my way into him was first of all, he was half-Japanese, but he's also somebody who uses humor as a defense mechanism; as a way to sort of protect himself. He’s also somebody who’s very self-destructive for the most part, which I could also relate to.

So it just felt like there was so much to use and it felt like something different to the kind of parts I’d played before. And the fact that it was a Japanese/British cross-continental thriller was so exciting to me. [There were] big sequences in the heart of Soho ‘cause I think everybody wanted London and Soho to feel genuine and not to feel like a weird facsimile of Soho. But also, just stolen moments, like that scene with Taki on the subway that you described. 

I wanted to ask you about the scene that happens later in the series, when your character Rodney is in a Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meeting and sort of overtakes the room for a period to tell his story. It's a particularly powerful moment because as an audience member, I remember thinking, “I have my own opinions about Rodney, but I'm not sure how Rodney feels about Rodney.” It's this great moment of understanding that this melancholy that you as the audience feel about Rodney's life is something he's aware of and something he's thinking about and something that weighs on him. What was that scene like to film? I feel like it's really a summation of him expressing the feelings that he's not yet perhaps said out loud and then is now doing so to a room full of strangers.

He's so defensive. For people who aren’t familiar with him: He's an addict, and particularly cocaine seems to be a big problem for him, but he kind of drifts into crack and other stuff during the series and this is the moment when he finally ends up at an NA meeting. Even in that moment when he’s accepting his vulnerability, he’s still pretty defensive. His way into it is obvious: Like, “What's the big fucking deal?” [Chuckles] “We hate ourselves; that's why we do this.” It was really fun to film, but I had a really bad cold; almost flu-esque. So it just felt like my whole head was on fire, my nose wouldn't stop running and it was kind of like, “Maybe this is good for a comedown NA meeting.” At one point [in the [past], I was developing a script about AA — though I don’t have alcohol problems myself — and a friend took me to a few AA meetings. I was thinking about what is strange and beautiful about those rooms; how everybody is in a different stage of recovery. There can be a sort of alchemy where it might take a long time for some people, but there is a way out. And what was attractive about Rodney, aside from the fact that he was kind of funny, was that he was very fragile and vulnerable. So I think even though the scene is not without its comedy — I remember Joe Barton was in on that day, and I was blowing my nose so much that he was like, “Why don't you just blow your nose really loud to get everyone’s attention?” And I was like, “Cool. Yeah, let's do that.” [Laughs] It's a moment of vulnerability for him and then as soon as he leaves, his armor is right back on.

Another Will Sharpe must-watch is your brilliant series Flowers. And it's interesting: I was going to attempt to describe Flowers, and I found myself writing and rewriting the description of the show because it's so hard to summarize. There’s the plot of Flowers and then there’s the experience of watching Flowers, which exist in tandem but are different. So, how do you describe Flowers to people?

I think I initially described it as a sitcom in its bones, but it's a comedy drama, really. It goes to some fairly heavy places, and it's sort of a family comedy-drama about mental illness and the idea of home and it was my first sort of proper grown-up commission. Before that, I'd made a couple of micro-budget movies with my friends. I think we worked out that we made it for the same amount as one second of The Transformers. [Laughs] We were the catering, we were the transport, we were everything. We cut it on our laptops, and by the end, the project was so huge that my laptop would routinely crash and it would take half an hour to open again. That was the first time we had permission to make something. I'd been going around pitching ideas and a couple producers had said, “It feels like you're trying to guess what we want. It feels like you're trying to sort of work out what the channel wants, but these ideas don’t really suit you. We want to know what you want to make.” So Flowers was what came out of me taking that advice, which worked out in this instance. I sometimes described it as a comedy with a mental illness subtext because the characters are sort of comedy characters and the story engines are often comedic, but it definitely does (necessarily) veer into dramatic territory because of the subject matter. After a while, it's like, “Well, I do have to get real about this at a certain point and be a little bit sincere, even if that’s a really dangerous world for some people in the comedy space.” So it was commissioned by the comedy department, but it is definitely something that has dramatic elements to it.

After you first got the feedback from the networks that you were trying to “reverse-engineer” a show, how did you go back to the drawing board? What were those original steps to get to what eventually became Flowers?

I mean, this is the cheesiest phrase, but I was honestly just trying to write from the heart. I think on the very first draft of the treatment, I wrote that I wanted this to be an uplifting show about melancholy. But as it went on, it was just sort of a ride to the exercise: Like, “Okay. I've written the scene where the father of the family has tried and failed to hang himself. Why did he get there? How did he get there? What are the repercussions of this? What does it do to his relationship with his wife? What did it do to his relationship with his kids?” Every decision I made had to circle back to that initial event. I ended up excavating accidentally, which is probably the right way to excavate it — by mistake. [Chuckles] Way more than I intended it to, it became an incredibly personal show. And when the series premiered just under 10 years ago, the conversation surrounding mental illness was not as evolved as it is now. So I remember in the script meeting, sometimes I needed to kind of defend the position or speak from experience in ways that you probably wouldn't need to do anymore. Even, for example, a simple question like, “But why is he depressed? Why? What is making him depressed?” And that would be the easy way (script-wise) to fix it: Give him some secret reason why he’s depressed. But it can just be that he's simply unwell. That is the most complicated thing to express and explain. It was a combination of being honest about what I wanted to say, having the right people, meeting the right people, and hard work.

I'm obsessed with music in television and film and the unconscious impact that it has on a lot of people. There are so many times I go back and watch things from my youth that affected me in a certain way, and now I’m like, “Wow, that acting is terrible, but the music got me over the line by telling me how to feel — without me even realizing I was being told exactly what to feel!” I feel like the music in your work is so important. There are so many clues throughout. And then, when I did my research, I found out the music is often done by your little brother! You work with your brother, Arthur, on the music for your projects quite a bit: on Flowers, Landscapers and The Electrical Life of Louis Wain. What is it like to be close to someone in life and then to share this artistic vision together?

My brother and I are pretty close in age and we're pretty close, but we don't have the kind of relationship where we talk really openly about our feelings with each other. Like, we're not going for a drink and talking about life for two hours. So I think what's interesting about collaborating on the movies and TV shows we’ve done together: I just see his life in a certain way and can express certain emotions because of the music that he’s sending me and surprising me with. And he probably feels the same way about me because of the scripts I'm sending him and the edits that he's getting from me. He always starts really early [when] I send him the script. For example, with Flowers, before we'd even shot the pilot, he’d sent me a couple of demos and there was a little bit of darkness to them, but they were quite playful and mischievous and it really helped me to get a sense of the tone of the show. It informed the world of the show, which is also informed by [the fact that] the father of the family writes children's books, so it has this kind of fairytale aesthetic to it. So there’s a kind of shorthand there and we can just be honest with each other and cut the bullshit. We work very hard together and we’re both quite attentive to detail. Music is a big part of anything, for me. The sonic world of a film is as important as the visual world and they all need to speak to each other. And so, whether it's on a location scout or whatever, I always have music demos in my back pocket so that if we're stuck in traffic or whatever, I can play them for the designer and it might spark off a conversation about which location we want to choose or just lead somewhere. That cross-pollination across departments is always important. But yes, I think that’s [my brother and me’s] deepest form of communication. [Laughs]

I think that’s quite profound, to be able to have that thing as a method of communication. It's off-kilter, but I think it's really powerful.

Yeah, hopefully. I mean, it's better than no communication. [Laughs]

One of the aspects of The White Lotus that I was the most interested in from the outset was the score. People talk a lot about the theme song for obvious reasons, but there’s an entire score that’s just as engrossing. You're an actor in the work, so the music is not playing as you are performing in those scenes. But as Will Sharpe, the viewer of the show, what was it like for you to see the music laid over this footage that you had filmed?

It's famously really hard to watch yourself in anything, so I don't feel like I can watch The White Lotus objectively. In terms of our story in our quartet: It's so toxic, in a way, the relationships there. And the music, for me, accentuates more than anything that tension and that feeling. And there’s something weird about Sicily, how it's so unthinkably beautiful and [yet] — maybe it’s the Mediterranean or Italy in general, but there’s also this weird sort of hot melancholy; this simmering darkness. And that's what the music does for me. And playing Ethan — he was somebody who was carrying a lot of tension and internalizing a lot of stress. I’m not a method actor on purpose, but I do find anyway that you sort of carry the character around with you a little bit, so if anything, I maybe find the music a little bit triggering now. [Laughs] I don't want to go back to that place where your marriage is falling apart! [Laughs] 

It’s funny that you mention method acting, because I wanted to ask you about it given your unique perspective as both an actor and a director. Method acting comes up from time to time in the press, and it’s revealed that an actor (often men) stayed in character for the entirety of production on something. I'm reminded of the 2021 profile in The New Yorker of Succession actor Jeremy Strong, in which he said, “I think you have to go through whatever the ordeal is that the character has to go through.” He also admitted to isolating himself from his castmates and sometimes refusing to rehearse because he wanted “every scene to feel like I'm encountering a bear in the woods.” As you said, in the case of The White Lotus, you didn't choose to take Ethan home with you, but the emotions sort of followed you even if you tried to rid yourself of them. I feel like there's always this fascination from the general public around method acting, so I'm wondering if — using both your director and actor brain — what your approach is to acting and what your thoughts are on method acting? 

As a director, I think one of the best things about rehearsal is that you get to know your cast and how each works differently and what they need from you and how to communicate with each other and how it's all going to sort of gel. I respect everybody's way into the work. Some people can be texting, making a shopping list, whatever, and then put their phone away and go on and nail it. Other people need to stay in character for the whole production. That's okay too. I know there are jokes about method acting where it's kind of like “no one ever says in character the whole time when it’s a really nice character.” [Laughs] But no, I understand it. For me, it’s just that you're thinking about it; you're thinking ahead to the scenes that are coming your way. You're trying to really imagine how it would feel to be that person. You’re just trying to lay a little bit of track so that you can get to the place that you need to get to in the time that you’re given. 

For me, one of the most fascinating things with The White Lotus is how much of a backstory I find myself giving these characters — despite there not being one. One of the interesting things about that final beat with Ethan and Harper at the airport is the unknown of what their future holds. Did this vacation in fact “fix” their marriage? Are they stronger than ever? That's the implication of that tableau; their body language suggests that they're finally sinking into one another instead of pulling apart. However, like what you were saying earlier about the music having a sinister nature, you can't help but look at that volcano in the background and say, “This is not a repaired marriage. This is a Band-Aid.” And yet, you also have to live with the fact that as a viewer, this story is complete. It's done, but because these characters are so lived in — both in the writing and in the performance — there's that feeling that makes me remain so curious as to where they’re going from here.

I agree. I feel like there are questions at the end, which is nice about the way [Mike White] sort of balanced it; you could see either way. I know that on that day at the airport, Mike really wanted us to be happy in that moment. But I feel like: Have they taken some small piece of Daphne and Cameron's marriage? Has it kind of reset the timer for them? Have they sort of broken the spell and found a new way of being together that’s healthier? Or is it that they are new to this world of privilege? And this interpretation would be the only version where I felt aware of my ethnicity in the making of this show, where it's kind of like their induction into this world of white privilege; they’re new to this world, they’ve just come into this money. They’re like,   “Hey, what’s to lose? Let’s go and treat ourselves.” And it's like: “If you want to exist on this plane with people like us, you have to be corrupted and be like this.”

And I always felt that with Ethan, he's so contained for the first five or six episodes, and then it starts to surface: He’s almost like, “I want to play by different rules. I want to play by rules that I think are what the rules should be.” Along the way, he keeps fucking up and making mistakes that are sometimes not his fault, but other times are his fault. Or initially he thinks it’s not his fault, and then he often makes it worse. In the end, it’s like: “If we’re not gonna play by these rules that I want to play by, we have to play by these fucked-up rules. So let's fucking play!” and then he kind of comes out of his shell and starts playing the game on Cameron's terms, on Harper’s terms, on Daphne's terms. He’s kind of being much more active and front-footed. I feel like there's definitely an element of romance to the way Mike balanced the ending, and I think it’s necessary to have that piece of light to get us through it — both as the cast and as the audience. But I agree, it’s definitely ambiguous. 

You mentioned that awareness of ethnicity, and I feel like there are a few moments within this season in which you have the characters of Cameron and Daphne acknowledging their whiteness and these vaguely racist moments where they clearly are not aware of the company that they brought here, but it's not really dug into. I know in The White Lotus Season One, there was a lot of — I don't want to say backlash, but a lot of people recognizing the whiteness of the show and the situation being that all of these privileged white people came to this island and treated the natives as service workers, which was complicated discourse because that is a reality for many people that travel to places like Maui. I'm wondering what it was like for you being on a mostly white set, especially one like this where you're pretty much isolated on-set in Sicily for a 7-month shoot. What was that experience like for you?

What was great about it, in part, was that Ethan is not an out-and-out, cartoon villain. I think there's villainy to him, and he's problematic. He's a problematic male, as are all the men on the cast, but he's not a cartoonish villain. He’s also not that kind of sickly-sweet nerd character that Asian men often get cast as. He’s somewhere in between; he’s morally gray. And as you say, the story isn't principally really about his ethnicity, so that was really liberating and I was really grateful for the opportunity to play that part. The tension for Ethan and the resentment isn't really principally based on ethnicity or heritage, but obviously I am playing an Asian-American so it would be one of the things going on in his head. So I sort of felt like sometimes probably that would — even on a subconscious level — be something that was going on for me in the performing of it, sort of supplementarily to whatever else was going on in the scene. 

When you’re an actor, you go into hair and makeup and you get into your costume and go on set. And I’m not saying this to throw anyone under the bus because they were all really lovely, but there were three Italian hair artists who were all the sweetest people and you get these continuity photos every day where they take pictures just to make sure your hair looks the same as it did yesterday. And one day, they came up to me and they were so pleased to share something with me and they showed me this photo and they were like, “We've worked out who it is that you look like! You look like Bruce Lee!” with big smiles [laughs], not realizing that any Asian man in the Western World will have had “Bruce Lee” or “Jackie Chan” shouted at them in the street at some point. But it was so innocent! There was not a drop of malice in it. This came every day: I would walk in and they would be like, “Ciao, Bruce!” [Laughs] I just didn’t wanna — ‘cause it was so warm and so loving, they didn't mean any harm. So I just went with it and I was like, “Yeah, man! Ciao! Good morning!” And it got to the point where other cast members would see it happen and be like, “What’s this Bruce Lee shit?” And I would be like, “Don’t worry about it. Just leave it.” [Laughs] I’m only sharing it because it’s something that tickled me and I found it funny. I am not sharing it to get anyone in trouble — there was not a drop of malice in it — but it’s impossible not to be aware of what you look like, sometimes, and particularly in a show like this, as it is predominantly white. I think Mike knows what he's writing about and he knows what he's saying, and we talked about the fact that I'm half-Japanese and Ethan is Asian American and how to balance and how to play that, but it wasn't the headline ever, which I think is refreshing.

As you are aware, hits of this magnitude are uncommon. There's just a feverishness to this fandom which means that anyone who touches this show sort of receives the magic; that Mike White touch. Their careers are impacted as a result. If you were to say what the ingredients are that make this a show that people not only enjoy watching, but also enjoy discussing in a way that I think is not unprecedented but incredibly rarefied, what would those ingredients be?

Mike has definitely cracked some kind of code. It's very hard to unpack. The simple answer is just that he’s very good and he's such a creature of precision that even if he likes to disguise himself as somebody who's like, “It’ll all just fall into place!” I always felt like he knew exactly what he wanted with every scene, and the scripts were also very clean, very immaculately balanced. A huge part of what’s enjoyable about the show is the sort of murder mystery element; not only do you get to spend time with these really well-drawn characters, you also get to play the game of trying to guess who's going to be killed. Maybe also the ensemble nature of it means that you get a taste of everyone but it feels that they're all kind of hinterland off-screen. With every character, with every relationship, there’s more to imagine, which I think we all felt as actors, too; there was space to imagine, so you would carry ideas of these characters home lives into the scenes — partly because you had time to think about that stuff, I guess, but also because maybe the show invites that. I left enlightened, and I'm a fan of Mike anyway, but there's definitely something about The White Lotus that seems to have just struck a chord. But I'm not a professor of television. [Laughs]

There is a similarity in you and Mike’s tracks in that both of you are actors, writers and directors, but also, interestingly, you both vacillate between these roles.

Sometimes, you'll have someone that starts as an actor who gets the directing bug and then becomes known as a director and sort of backs away from acting, but not with either of you. Looking at your career, you're writing and directing, then you go and perform in someone else's work, then you're back to writing and directing. How is your acting enriched by your directing, and how is your directing enriched by your acting?

I think it all feeds into each other, really. I guess maybe because I started out just with a camera and some friends, trying to shoot some scenes that I've always seen it ultimately in that way. Whatever the scale of the project, it’s just a bunch of people trying to make a film together. Sometimes I use the analogy of cycling and driving a car: In London, there is this sort of unexplained, fierce rivalry between cyclists and drivers. But if you're driving and you’ve recently been on a bicycle, you can remember how it felt to be on that bicycle so you sort of cut them some slack because it is quite scary to be on a bicycle. Similarly, if you’ve recently driven a car and you’re on your bike, [you know] they’re not trying to kill you; it's just a narrow road. So I think that can be helpful: a slightly enhanced degree of empathy for the actors if you’re directing. You remember how it felt to wait four hours for lighting and then suddenly you've got 45 minutes to shoot the most important scene of the show or whatever it is. And similarly, when you're coming to set, you’re also appreciative of the fact that the director has a hundred million things on their mind. But I learn something from every job, and I always feel like it's this weird sort of privilege to be able to be an actor on other directors’ sets. As a director, I get to learn from other people and see what other sets are like, so I’m trying to be appreciative of that; something unusual that’s also a gift, really.

I want to ask you about your lack of social media presence. I imagine that one of the pros of not having social media is the anonymity, which I think is really helpful. I wish more actors would maybe think about this in that the less that we (the public) know about you, the easier it's going to be for us to believe you in a role; to not take our preconceived notions of who you are and put that on top of the role. But, on the other side of it, it's a business, right? Social media and those numbers are something that a lot of Hollywood executives and executives outside of Hollywood — people laying down the money — care about. Where do you come down on that?

I don't do it because I felt like I was happier off it and I wasn't getting enough from it. It was as simple as that. Occasionally, someone will ask me if I would ever go on it and whether it would be helpful and so far, I’ve just resisted it. But I don't have anything against people who are on social media. It doesn't feel like it's something that would enrich my life, particularly. The whole thing is a balance. The principal way for me to communicate with the public and to an audience is through the work, whether it's through a performance or through making a show or a movie. That's how I want to talk with the audience, but I also understand that it's important to engage with them, to talk to people like yourself and be available and to frame the work for the public. And I remember a big turning point for me was talking with a producer, and he was talking about some other friends of his who had sort of disappeared a little bit from the limelight. And I remember him saying, “It's really sad: They think that they’re Radiohead, but they’re not Radiohead.” And that really stuck with me. It’s kind of like there's no point in making stuff that you're proud of if you’re just making it in a vacuum, so you have to put yourself out there. But I haven't been tempted by social media at all so far. We’ll see.

Evan Ross Katz on Instagram: “Respectfully gazing at the frustratingly Instagram-less Will Sharpe lensed by Pip for ESQUIRE.”

December 5, 2022

I bring it up because I feel like you're among a set of actors/directors/auteurs for whom there’s a lot of public goodwill. I feel like we live in a world right now where a lot of people that are just living their life are somehow deemed “polarizing.” I think about someone like Taylor Swift, for instance: She breaks up with her boyfriend and it’s like everyone has to have an opinion about this person and their relationship and their boyfriend and there are think pieces — all of that stuff over just a person and who they love. And you're someone that when I see your name pop up online — I even think about the announcement of Crying in H Mart and how excited people were, both because of their love for Michelle and their love for you and this book and saying, “This is such an exciting pairing!” However, you're not online to sort of pick up what’s being put down. I think that's maybe healthy, right? I don't necessarily know if you being online and seeing how much people love you and love your work does anything or if it’s even worth hearing. But I guess what I'm getting at is: Is there a part of you that’s ever like, “Wow, I want to go online and see what the conversation is?” Because it's a good conversation, but does that benefit you at all?

I think you get a sense of it just from your life and just from conversations in life and even interactions with the public.

Evan Ross Katz on Instagram: “Soaking wet for this WHITE LOTUS multiverse link-up today at Loewe FW23 featuring Season 1’s Murray Bartlett and Season 2’s Will Sharpe.”

January 21, 2023

Wait, so you’re saying there's a world outside of the Internet???

I think so. Just about, still. [Laughs] Even if you think about the world of reviews and things, I think it's healthy to take everything with a pinch of salt. And for me, I work very hard on the things that I'm working on, partly because I know that if I haven't finished the job feeling like I put everything that I could put into that, then there will be something that will haunt me afterwards. Whether it's a success or not, I just need to feel like I put everything in that I could have put in, and I think that's because that's what gives me a feeling of satisfaction: That I did what I could and I really gave it everything, and then it doesn't really matter what people think. It doesn't matter if you enjoyed the process. That's the important part for me. And not having social media, you can be affected by how many people are watching something or what the general critical consensus is — that can affect you, because everybody is human. But I try to have some distance from it always. 

And from looking at your resume, it seems as soon as you finish one project, you go on to the next thing. You dive into the next work to continue to do the thing you love. I think about Landscapers, for instance, a terrific show that's so unlike your other work. I imagine it's exciting when you get to just keep making exciting projects, whether that be behind the camera or in front of it. It almost gives you less time to gestate in the court of public opinion and sort of dive right back into the world of making the things that people then have an opinion about.

Yeah, definitely. There are obviously necessary breaks, but I feel like I'm happiest trying to — I love collaborating with people and finding new collaborators, revisiting old collaborators, deepening those relationships, and just finding out what the stories are that excite me and [how I] want to tell them.

On the topic of collaborators: Olivia Colman is a frequent collaborator of yours. I really do feel like you bring out some of her best work, and that's really saying something when you have a body of work as robust and acclaimed as Olivia's. Who is someone else on that list? An actor — established or not — that's just someone you're really keen to work with and exchange ideas with.

Oh, my gosh. So many! There are so many great people. I guess my personal taste is that I don't find things funny unless I feel like the characters are grounded in some kind of reality and are three-dimensional. And similarly, I'm rarely moved by something unless it has a little bit of a sense of humor. And I really felt like (of course) Olivia is really able to balance the light with the dark so effortlessly, and I'm always fascinated by people like that. But I'm wary of just firing these amazing names at you. [Chuckles] I’m sifting through my brain and I’m like, “You can’t say that. That’s high in the sky, man!” 

I imagine it's kind of like what you were talking about earlier when you were discussing working with Michelle, where so much of it is chemistry-based. You might really want to work with an actor because you love their work, but you might get in the room with them and feel no spark that makes you want to work with them in any capacity. So I really think that naming names is one thing, but getting in the room with the person and seeing whether or not you spark is a whole other thing. And with Olivia, you get the impression from watching these varied works of yours together that there is that creative spark that exists between the two of you.

Yes, but interestingly, I don't think it came straight away. So on the rehearsals for the pilot of Flowers, which is when we first worked together, I remember her sort of saying, “I'm not super keen on rehearsals,” and so I was trying to get a sense of how she works and I was like, “Are you more instinctive? Do you like to sort of feel it out?” and we had a slightly awkward conversation trying to just figure each other out. And through the shooting of the pilot, which [was about] six days, I think we worked pretty well together but I didn't give her that many notes, partly because I just felt like she knows what she's doing and I didn’t want to get in the way. And I [was] just starting out then, and I think by then she had already done Tyrannosaur and Broadchurch and was already at a level that seemed way above where I was at as an early director. And after the pilot got green-lit, I remember us talking and Olivia sort of agreeing, “I really like notes and you can [give] feedback to me,” and that sort of opened something up. So then, shooting the series, I felt much more able to be honest and be like, “I don’t think that worked, let’s do it again,” and from then, it felt like we really found a rhythm that we could build on. And by the time we were shooting Landscapers, I remember that there were a couple of scenes where she was doing some really extraordinary work and I would be there at the monitor and I remember saying to her, “It's weird ‘cause I know that you can do this so it's easy to take it for granted, but that was really extraordinary, still, what you did.” That’s what amazing about people, I guess.

That moment with Olivia, with you telling her it was amazing — that, too, is directing. Directing’s not just telling the actor to go to this mark or do this thing. I see affirming a performance that was given as part of the directing process. It's not just the work one does with the actors; it's also with the writers. It's also in those human moments. I went to NYU for directing a long time ago and I haven't done it in quite a bit, but I remember that a lot of it was earning that trust through human behavior, social dynamics, creating or destroying the hierarchy — however you choose to run your room. But you are in control of the temperature of the room, which informs the work as much as the directions that come out of your mouth.

You just have to be empathetic, I think, whatever your role is. Filmmaking is an insanely collaborative process, so the cast needs to be empathetic of the crew, and the crew needs to be empathetic of the cast. You need to be empathetic of the director’s needs. The director needs to be empathetic of everybody's needs — even the people above them, who are funding the film. So I agree with you that it is about forming those human connections and being mindful of where everyone else is at. You might have your list of things that you need to solve on any given day, but the more that you can work together to solve the biggest headline problems as a group, the better. I often think about how it is basically an exercise in empathy.

Which goes back to the metaphor of the cyclists and the car: It's having that empathy for the cyclist if you're in the car.

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