Sarah Catherine Hook is aware that she is the one for you.

      Sarah Catherine Hook assumed that Mike White was toying with her. After her initial audition for the third season of The White Lotus—where White serves as the sole creator, director, and writer—Hook had a callback with him. She had almost no context apart from her character's name and a few lines. "Going into it, I believed it would be a really intense callback," she tells me over Zoom, just a week before the season's premiere. "We were going to engage in deep philosophical discussions about Piper's role, and I thought I needed to be fully prepared for this!" However, when White joined the call, she felt her anxiety lessen slightly as he greeted her with a big grin on screen. "Mike was like, 'Heeeeeeey, what's up?' It was so relaxed, as if we were just having lunch together," she recalls. "He kept asking me questions like, 'Where are you?' or 'How was your Christmas?' and then said, 'Listen, I loved your tapes. You're fantastic! Let's just do the scene, and if I have any feedback, I'll share it. But honestly, I think you're great.'" Hook sat there in disbelief before performing the scene, and the callback wrapped up quickly thereafter. "Typically, that's a bad sign. I thought, 'I'm so puzzled. What just happened?' It was the strangest audition I've ever experienced," she continues.

      It's amusing to hear Hook describe feeling unprepared for White's casualness because I had a similar feeling about her. She took our call from her bed, clad in a white pointelle set and adjusting loose strands of her messy bun. Before I could introduce myself, she dove into an apology for her setting, then spread her arms wide, expressing enthusiasm for our conversation. "I thought, 'Let's just dive in!'" she exclaims. Hook possesses an unspoiled excitement that feels increasingly rare in this industry. After just a few minutes with her, you get the impression that she is constantly putting in the work because she genuinely loves what she does. It's as much her profession as it is her passion.

      Hook identifies herself as "an original fan" of the show. She mentions that she watched it as it aired, before the hype began, and was immediately captivated, along with the over nine million other initial viewers. Receiving the audition for Piper Ratliff, the middle child of a wealthy Southern family vacationing at the White Lotus in Thailand, felt like a victory to her. "I'm genuinely someone who loves auditioning. I don't experience that whole, 'Oh, I have to audition—how dreadful! How can they ask me to audition!' mentality. I'm one of the rare ones who could audition for a living. In fact, I do! I was just so thrilled to tackle this one," she says.

      But this audition was different in many respects. "There was a lot of initial talk about Mike really liking my tapes and my look for the role," Hook recounts. "I started to feel like I was the one for the part. But it was agonizing because we didn't hear anything for a month and a half, and I thought, 'What is happening?' I was freaking out for some reason because I kept wondering, 'Why is he playing this game with me?'"

      The period between Hook's initial audition and her call with White felt endless. When the crucial final step she had been anxious about turned out to be so informal and swift, she found herself feeling suddenly anxious. She experienced whiplash. "The day after my Zoom with Mike, I received the call that I got the role. I thought, 'Why was that so simple and also so excruciating?'" Hook reflects. To celebrate, she chose to watch School of Rock, the film White wrote and starred in as Ned Schneebly, with her family. "It was a wholesome time," she laughs.

      Even after landing the role, Hook felt a lingering suspicion that perhaps she was being pranked. She always believed she was Piper, but as she learned more about the character, she began to feel unnerved by the parallels. "I'm from Alabama. Piper and I are both Southern girls. I'm the middle child between two brothers in real life. I grew up in church, went to college, had a somewhat new experience, and that was my first introduction to Buddhism." As seen in the initial episodes of the third season, Piper hopes to interview a local Buddhist monk for her college thesis. While her family is supportive of her academic pursuits in a religion that isn't theirs, they are limited in their acceptance. "I had to read an Eckhart Tolle book in college, and I remember returning home and saying, 'Guys, Buddhism is the way.' My mom was like, 'But what about Jesus?' She was panicking, and it's funny because, when I read Piper's script, I felt like I was reading about