Sabrina Impacciatore Reports for Duty

The White Lotus star got Steve Carell's blessing after joining the Office spinoff about a flailing newspaper.

- BY JACKSON MCHENRY

CAN YOU HEAR this sound?” Sabrina Impacciatore asks, holding up her laptop on a summery succulent-filled patio. “It’s the crickets singing. They sing all day long. It’s incredible.” The eternally enthusiastic Italian actress is at her escape on the island of Formentera—near Ibiza, she explains, gesticulating wildly as she maps the Mediterranean for me with her hands—taking some time to recharge amid her increasingly busy schedule. She's well known in her home country, where she first started acting as a teenager on variety shows before segueing into comedic and dramatic roles in film and on television. But after nabbing the part of the stern hotel manager Valentina in the second season of The White Lotus (2022), Impacciatore was launched into fame in Hollywood. “It was like in Italy when the football team wins the championship,” she tells me. “Everybody had watched the match.”

Now, Impacciatore will continue her conquest of America by inserting herself into an even more beloved national franchise. In The Paper, a spinoff of The Office that airs on Peacock, Impacciatore plays Esmeralda Grand, the managing editor of a floundering local newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, who has previously appeared on the reality show