Like most lifelong New Yorkers, 21-year-old White Lotus season 3 star Sam Nivola has experienced the special kind of sadness of seeing a place you once loved turned into something else over time. A beloved bodega becomes a bank, a local restaurant becomes a Starbucks. He remembers a place called Building on Bond, a cheap lunch spot close to where he grew up on Dean Street in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn.

“And then it was bought out by Cafe Kitsuné,” he says with some exasperation. “I don't even know what Cafe Kitsuné is. They sell clothes, but also coffee, and it was just like, ‘F*ck you, get out of town.’ The coffees are $11. I had to stop drinking coffee, it was so expensive.”

He’s not precious about sharing his favorite places in New York; we’re eating at one of them now, MUD on the Lower East Side, a cramped restaurant frequented by NYU students and 20-somethings in flannel plaid button-downs and oversized coats. When I arrive first, I ask the host to send a tall, lanky white boy in glasses to the back. She barely manages to not roll her eyes while replying, “Everyone here looks like that.”

Nivola does blend in, wearing a gray sweater, North Face jacket, and red hunting cap over his light brown curls. “I used to come here when I was in high school,” he says as he sits down at the table. He describes himself as a “total loser” in those days, a “ Dungeons and Dragons kid” who luckily had a cooler best friend who’d take him to cool places outside of their neighborhood on occasion. Still, he spent most of his time in Brooklyn, the child of two acting industry parents — Emily Mortimer ( The Newsroom , Shutter Island ) and Alessandro Nivola ( The Brutalist ) — who traveled often while he was growing up.

But stability was something of an illusion for kids like Nivola, who are of the generational pocket of young people whose high school years were pretty much wholly taken over by COVID-19 . He remembers being studious in middle school and grabbing a Criterion Collection membership to impress a girl. Then the pandemic hit and made everything kind of blurry. The path before him suddenly wasn’t so clear, and he’d already been thinking about how to make a go of it in acting, despite his parents’ wishes.

“I feel like all students my age had a reckoning of, if all these institutions that we put so much faith in, whether it be college, high school, work, 9 to 5, whatever, if all of these things can just evaporate because of an act of god, like a virus, then are they so intrinsic to... This sounds silly, but, are they as intrinsic to humanity as we thought they were, or is it just a thing that we're expected to do, that maybe needs to be looked into more about why we do it? You know what I mean?” he muses, making eye contact.

As a high school senior, Nivola nabbed his first big movie role as Adam Driver’s character’s son in the Noah Baumbach film White Noise and filmed that for seven months in Ohio. After graduation, he took a gap year to run around Italy “getting espressos and eating the best food you've ever had, drinking wine with my family, and chasing girls that were out of my league,” he laughs. If you’re picturing Timotheé Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name , he says that’s exactly the right vibe.

When he started running out of money, he tried out a few months in L.A., thinking he’d meet with casting directors and become a big Hollywood name. His agent told him everything was over Zoom now, the offices were all closed, and there was really no reason for him to be there. So, he went back to school and made it a single semester at Columbia University before dropping out with bad grades.

The college thing was tough for his parents. They ended up pulling a classic move: No college, no financial support. (Though he admits that if he’d “really gotten myself in trouble, they would've helped me, they're my parents.”) But it did the trick, lighting a fire under him and forcing him to think at least a little practically as he followed his dreams. By that point, Nivola had already realized he didn’t want to live in fear of failure. “I’d much rather work in a café every day for the rest of my life and put on plays with my friends than I would be an accountant.”

While Columbia didn’t work out, he did love living up near campus in Harlem. “I feel like Harlem is one of the only places left in the city where you have a community that looks after each other, where you have the old men that sit on their stoop and watch everything that goes on, and if someone's being picked on or harassed or whatever, they get involved,” he says. “It's a real community. I wish I'd stayed up there, but [the East Village] is where it's at.”

If there’s any time to live in the East Village, with its vagabond artist mythology and grime, it’s your early 20s. He walked to MUD from the apartment he recently moved into with girlfriend, fellow actor, and fellow kid of industry parents, Iris Apatow . It’s the first time he’s lived with a romantic partner.

“I'm so in love, and she's so amazing,” he says, mentioning they both have a crush on a server at MUD, so it’s heavy in their lunch rotation. “I think the thing about moving in with someone is that when you're this young, it's always like, ‘Oh my God, you're going to get sick of them.’ You're going to spend all day, every day together, and then it's going to be routine, and you're going to feel like you've been in a marriage for 30 years. I don't think that would happen with her anyway, just because we're so in love. But I think the nature of us being actors really helped, because we're never at home for more than a few months, and that natural space from each other is really healthy, and it makes it so much more exciting when you get to come home to your partner. Also she has great taste, so we don't argue on decorating.”

Nivola has learned an early lesson of living on your own and furnishing an apartment: rugs are often more expensive than couches. They picked one out that merges their two styles. He’s into rustic Persian vibes and wood furniture, Apatow is all about pastels and pinks. They compromised on a beautiful faded pastel green situation, snagged for $200.

The pair met through their mutual friend Isa Barrett, who Nivola met through the New York City school circuit, one night at a bar in London. Nivola had brought along his best friend Teddy (with whom he runs a production company called Cold Worm) and Teddy and Barrett “hit it off” and got together not long after. Nivola had been trying to shoot his shot with Apatow, but she had a boyfriend at the time and “was not having it, which is good of her.” Months and months later, they broke up and Nivola saw his opening. “We're all still together,” he says. “Our two best friends are all together. It's amazing.”

Like any self-respecting child of actors who grew up in New York, Nivola frequents Film Forum, IFC Center, and Village East and has strong opinions about movies. His favorite film of the year was The Brutalist (“I know, I know,” he says about the free promo for his dad’s work), and he thinks it’s practically a crime that the Italian World War II drama Vermiglio wasn’t nominated for an Oscar, nor was Babygirl , which he loved. “By the way, did you see that Emilia Pérez is nominated for best French foreign film? You can't have it both ways.”

He’s into art that takes big swings, even if they don’t always work — though all the better if they do. So far, those instincts have served him well in his own burgeoning acting career, where he’s played a series of innocent boyish-grinned teenagers learning some hard truths about life (Alexander Bernstein in Maestro , Will Winbury in The Perfect Couple ). He’s gotten lucky, he says, with no barista job required as he’s landed role after role, most recently as Lochlan Ratliff in The White Lotus season 3 .

Lochlan is the youngest of three, an awkward, naïve high school senior whose mom (Parker Posey) and dad ( Jason Isaacs ) are trying to persuade him to attend their respective alma maters, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill or Duke. He has intense, potentially worrisome relationships with his Buddhist-lite sister Piper ( Sarah Catherine Hook ) and toxically masculine brother Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) who present two ways of life to him: spiritual piety or greedy hedonism.

But Nivola sees Lochlan’s motivation as desiring affection; he doesn’t really want to make a whole philosophical decision about the direction of his life. “He wants love and attention, and he's just so insecure. I think he doesn't care about the philosophies that both of them are preaching to him, really,” he says. “Whichever one he thinks is going to provide him with more support and love and care, that's the one he's going to go with.”

Filming in Thailand was an isolating experience, he says, though he credits series creator and director Mike White with bringing together a group of people who really vibe together. Nivola became close with the ensemble cast, who all stayed at the same hotel during the seven months of filming — even stars like Lisa Manobal (of BLACKPINK) who he only had a few scenes with.

“She was awesome,” he says of Lisa. “It's funny, I am just not at all clued in with pop music in general but also K-pop. Now that I've listened to it, and I've listened to her music, I f*cking love it. I didn't really know who she was, to be honest, until I met her, and then everyone was like, ‘She's the most famous person in the Eastern Hemisphere.’ I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ She's just really cool and sweet, and she took us to this cool bar in Bangkok. She's built a life for herself in Seoul, and is a K-pop star, but of course is initially from just north of Bangkok, and it was cool to see her in her original environment.”

The experience taught him a lot about being away from home, and how important it is to surround himself with good people who care about him. Apatow came to visit for a few months during filming, which he says was “a lifesaver.” And his onscreen family supported him when he’d get anxious about being on a show that’s “a big f*cking deal,” and when he worried he’d fail or screw it all up.

Hook and Schwarzenegger are texting him right now, and their names pop up in a cast group chat we can all be jealous of. On his lock screen is a photo of Apatow smiling with their cat, Kumo. And actually, it’s time for him to head out — he and Apatow are catching a screening of Companion at a theater nearby. But he leaves thinking about making stuff with his friends. With his production company Cold Worm, they’ve done two feature films that they’ll soon submit to festivals, and Teddy has written a TV season that Nivola is manifesting HBO will pick up.

“We're still young and inexperienced, but we're trying to make it work,” Nivola says, “It's really fun. And while you're making sh*t with your friends, you can try and see if someone wants to give you a million dollars to do it... and probably won't, and then you can keep making sh*t with your friends.”