bitchy | Sam Nivola: ‘I don’t think I can attribute much of my success to my parents’

Of all the under-30 nepo babies in the film/television industry right now, I think Sam Nivola is one of the most talented. He’s the son of actors Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola. While Sam didn’t get his earliest roles because of his parents, he doesn’t actually acknowledge that he certainly has a leg up in the industry. That being said, he’s actually been an auditioning-and-jobbing actor for years. He’s had a huge breakthrough in the past year, first with the campy ensemble drama The Perfect Couple (he played Nicole Kidman’s youngest kid) and then he played the youngest child of Parker Posey and Jason Isaacs’ couple in The White Lotus. Sam is going to be booking tons of jobs off of his star turn in TWL. I think he was robbed of an Emmy nomination honestly – the only reason he didn’t get nominated for TWL is because all of the other actors involved with that show got nominated. Anyway, Sam has a new profile in Variety. He talks about nepo babies and a lot more – he’s 21 years old and pretty unfiltered for a guy whose parents work in the industry too. Some highlights:

On ‘The White Lotus’: “It’s totally changed my life and the scope of my career…When ‘The White Lotus’ was at its peak, I literally couldn’t walk down the street in Brooklyn — my hometown — without being swarmed.”

His parents forbade him from auditioning before he was 18: When Nivola was 17, his high school drama teacher helped him net an audition for “White Noise,” in which he’d play the son of Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig’s characters. It was during the pandemic, and Nivola sent in a self-tape in secret. He only told his parents about the opportunity once he made it to the next round. “Holy f–king sh-t, it’s a Noah Baumbach movie?! You have to do the callback!” he remembers his parents saying.

On the idea that he’s a nepo baby: “Other than my genes, I don’t think I can attribute much of my success to my parents. I feel proud that I’ve done it for myself, and sometimes in spite of them.” Of his first movie role, he says, “I didn’t get my dad’s agent to call up so-and-so. I did it by myself. I didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to be able to say that anything I’ve achieved has been because of anyone other than me. And I’m proud of that.”

When the Nivola family is out, people stop him, not his parents: “But that just goes to show the trappings of fame. Because I’m not half as talented as my father or my mother.”

He got the role in ‘The White Lotus’ the old-fashioned way, by auditioning: “I’m just grateful that there are people who are not casting things based on how many Instagram followers you have,” Nivola says. (He has 145,000.) “They’re casting based on who is right for the job. Like, ‘You might not be Jacob Elordi, but you’re the guy.’”

He just filmed an R-rated comedy: “It’s rare to have comedies at all. It’s been pretty dry for a little while…Can you think of any good ones that have come out in the last five years? Other than ‘Friendship’?” He attributes the decline to studios being more financially “conservative.” “They’ve ‘Moneyball’-ed the film industry! Everything is about data now — and trying to predict, to the nearest dollar, how much money a movie’s going to make. It screws the idea of risk-taking, and comedy is more about risk-taking than any other genre.”

Old movie stars: “The old movie stars are getting plastic surgery, and they’re looking younger and they’re staying young. You have these really old people playing young roles. And it’s not giving any space for the young’uns to move in and make a name for themselves. With all due respect to those people, one day they won’t be here anymore, literally, and they will have to create new stars.”

He loves acting: “I love acting so much that I would be totally content working a run-of-the-mill, 9-to-5, minimum-wage job for the rest of my life if I got to do this on weekends.”

On the state of the American film industry: “One of the biggest fears I have is that nothing can afford to shoot in America anymore,” Nivola says. The business model of moviemaking in the U.S. is so out of whack that “you can hire a team of 10 gaffers in Hungary for cheaper than hiring one key grip in Los Angeles. It’s so silly, Trump saying he’s going to put a tariff on foreign films. That’s the opposite of what we need to be doing. It’s not that we shouldn’t be watching foreign films; it’s that we need more tax incentives to shoot movies in America.”

[From Variety]

He also talks about how America should invest in making films (of all varieties) accessible to younger people, like the British Film Institute does. Meaning, I suppose, investing in cheaper screenings of art films and foreign films and the like. Plus, massive tax incentives for productions within the UK. As for the nepo baby drama… he IS a nepo baby, even if he didn’t get his start through his parents’ contacts. He still gets to go into auditions and people are like “wait, your parents are Emily and Alessandro, right?” He seems like a smart young guy, and it seriously never hurts to just acknowledge your baseline privilege.

Sam Nivola on the impact of “The White Lotus”: “It’s totally changed my life and the scope of my career.”

“When ‘The White Lotus’ was at its peak, I literally couldn’t walk down the street in Brooklyn — my hometown — without being swarmed.” pic.twitter.com/Vq7Z3WNNoi

— Variety (@Variety) August 7, 2025

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.