I try desperately to avoid watching myself on screen

Sabrina Impacciatore, who won fame for her fiery turn in 'The White Lotus', talks to Ellie Harrison about being a queer icon, her role in 'The Paper', and the time she met Al Pacino

- Ellie Harrison

For Sabrina Impacciatore, there are three key pleasures in life. She counts them off on her manicured fingers, fixing me with a smoky-eyed stare. “Allora,” she begins. “Of course, sex is the highest pleasure. Then there is food. And then there is acting.”

The Italian star, known to most for her standout performance as neurotic hotel manager Valentina in The White Lotus, explains that these joys all have one thing in common: “These are moments where you lose your sense of self. It’s like touching paradise.” Tears begin to fill her eyes. “Acting, to me, is forgetting who I am. It’s going somewhere I've never been before, meeting humans in that place, and discovering life. It’s a moment of big connection. It is” - her voice breaks - “an orgasm.”

It should come as no surprise that Impacciatore’s outsized passion is what has made her famous - at least internationally. After decades of toiling away in the Italian TV and film industry, she channelled all that fervour, eccentricity and depth of feeling into The White Lotus’s Valentina, winning millions of fans for her turn as a lonely, stressed-out, ferocious mess of a woman in the midst of a sexual awakening. Her improvised line, where she tells Jennifer Coolidge’s billionaire Tanya that she looks like “Peppa Pig!”, became an instant meme. An Emmy nomination soon followed.

We have met in central London to discuss her role in Sky’s new American mockumentary The Paper (a spin-off from the US remake of The Office). Everything about her is big and bright. The lips. Bam. The eyes. Bam. The hair. Bam! After the tearful orgasm comment, Impacciatore, who is 57, gestures to her smiling publicist, sitting behind us, and explains that, after a long day of interviews, he is happy with what she’s telling me.