For Terry Knickerbocker, the call came in the dead of night.
It was Sam Rockwell, his longtime friend and client. Knickerbocker, a renowned acting coach based in New York, has worked with Rockwell on every gig since the early 1990s, helping Rockwell find the shades and contours of everyone from Chuck Barris to Bob Fosse.
So close are the two, Rockwell served as best man at Knickerbocker’s wedding and thanked Knickerbocker by name when he accepted his 2018 Oscar for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
Rockwell, 56, was calling from South Africa, where for months he had been working on a grueling shoot for Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, a sci-fi feature also starring Juno Temple from director Gore Verbinski. The film requires him to recite a 10-page monologue.
“We worked on that monologue for months just to hit all the points,” Knickerbocker, 69, says.
But it was not that movie that he was calling about. Another opportunity had presented itself, this one a small role on a TV show — and it too involved a monologue that would require some serious workshopping. That is, if he was going to do it at all.
“He was saying, ‘What do you think? Should I take this job?’” Knickerbocker recalls. “Because Sam doesn’t really do TV for the most part. He did Fosse/Verdon, but for the most part he does either plays or movies and is very, very choosy about the projects that he takes. So it was an offer, but he wasn’t sure whether in his words, he ‘could score’ — meaning not in terms of fame, but more like, ‘is this great work for me to do?’”
Of course, this was no ordinary TV show. It was The White Lotus, HBO’s sexy and subversive watercooler smash from creator Mike White, which was well into shooting its third season, set at the fictional luxury chain resort of the title — this time in Thailand.
But this was no ordinary monologue. As written by White, it required the character to reveal to longtime friend (a memorably agog Walton Goggins) what led him from the fast lane into a life of contemplative, abstinent Buddhism. The journey involves sex — lots, with both men and women — and an exploration into the idea that the character may have been born the wrong race and gender.
Making the trip from South Africa to Thailand more appealing was the chance to see his partner, Leslie Bibb, who was already cast on the series, playing one of three childhood frenemies on vacation. (She says she had nothing to do with suggesting Rockwell for the part, and that the offer came from White personally after another actor dropped out of the role at the last minute.)
Another enticement: working with Goggins, a longtime friend of Rockwell’s. “There’s a lot of mutual respect there,” Knickerbocker notes. Filming his role on White Lotus would take one week, and a break in the Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die schedule would allow him to do it.
The content was very explicit and highly controversial, but that did not scare Rockwell.
“Sam is an actor’s actor, and if it’s well-written and it’s a cool story and especially if he hasn’t really done it before, he’s down to do it,” says Knickerbocker, who only saw upsides to the offer. “I thought it was definitely worth working on. And the monologue was the selling point.”
That clinched it. From then on, Rockwell “was all in.”
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Rockwell and Knickerbocker met in New York City in 1991. Rockwell was 22 at the time, bussing tables at a restaurant to make rent money and taking acting classes at William Esper Studio, where its namesake founder taught Sanford Meisner’s acting technique — more commonly known as “the method” — to the likes of Kathy Bates and John Malkovich.
“It was a little studio on Third Avenue,” Rockwell told The Hollywood Reporter last year in an interview about his training regime. One day Knickerbocker came in as a substitute teacher and the two instantly clicked. “I would bum Camel Lights off Terry. We’d smoke the down in the studio and we weren’t allowed to. We’d work on auditions at night after class was over. One of the auditions was for Box of Moonlight.”
Rockwell got the part — one of his first significant screen roles — in the 1996 indie comedy, which also starred John Turturro and Catherine Keener. “So I said, ‘You know what? Let’s keep working together,” he continues. “And that’s how it happened. We kept working ever since.”
These days, Rockwell can afford whatever it costs to spend hours with Knickerbocker for one-on-one sessions in which they parse every word, every beat of a script, mining it for nuance, surprises and believability. But even in the lean times, Rockwell always found a way to pay for it.
“It’s a big investment on Sam’s part or the other people that I work with,” says Knickerbocker, whose other clients include Sacha Baron Cohen, Emma Rossum and Boyd Holbrook. “Nothing in an actor’s contract stipulates anything about needing a coach. That all comes out of their own pocket.”
“You’re paying someone to problem solve,” Rockwell explains.
While Frank, Rockwell’s role, was not limited to the monologue — he appeared briefly this week and there is more of Frank to come — the monologue was the centerpiece of his arc and required the most attention. The two began by discussing the material — and the monologue in particular.
“It’s a very spicy monologue and it’s a very interesting monologue,” Knickerbocker says. “We referred to Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now— an iconic look into the dark soul of a strange man.”
From there they delved into the text — 550 odd words interrupted by the occasional “really?” and “uh-huh” from a stunned Goggins.
“We were just trying to find the shape of it. What are the beats? What words are useful to play around with? What are associations that we can make that make sense to Sam to get the vibration of that?” Knickerbocker explains.
Those “associations” are one of Meisner’s fundamental techniques. “It’s something called the substitution or emotional memory,” says Rockwell. “And Meisner calls it particularization.’” It involves replacing a concept in the script with another from one’s own life in order to elicit real, relatable emotion.
For example, Frank begins the monologue by addressing his struggles with substance abuse — something Rockwell could not relate to. Nor was Frank’s embrace of Eastern religion something that particularly resonated with him.
“Sam’s an introspective person and he knows himself very well, but he’s not a spiritual person,” Knickerbocker says. “In a way, art-making is his religion So Buddhism wasn’t going to make sense to him the way it might to somebody else who had that orientation. We had to find some sort of analog to that, whether it was about his relationship to family or to art or to animals. He’s got a strong connection to animals.”
Says Rockwell, “You collect these notes and particularizations and you write them on your script. And you use them along the way to personalize the material.” Occasionally, out of these sessions an entire behavioral habit or idiosyncrasy will emerge — one the writer had never specified or intended.
“When I did Three Billboards, I stammered when I said ‘mama’ one time when I was reading for Terry,” Rockwell recalls. “He said, ‘Do that again.’ And I said, ‘Do what again?’ ‘You stammered when you said ‘mama.’ So then we developed that into a thing for the character.’ That’s just a light bulb moment.”
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Rockwell spent a week filming White Lotus in Thailand. He communicated with Knickerbocker throughout the shoot — including “before, during and after” filming the monologue sequence, according to the acting coach.
“He felt good about it. He felt really good about it. He’s not a braggart, but I would say he has an internal barometer for how things are going,” Knickerbocker says. “I think he said, ‘Yeah, it went well.”
For Rockwell, there was no other way to take on the monologue that has the entire world talking.
“I think people there’s a misconception that if you go to acting coach, you’re not directable. But actually it’s quite the opposite,” Rockwell says. “It makes you extremely directable, because you can go in any direction. You’re equipped with an arsenal of ideas and you can take on anything the director throws at you.
“There’s no such thing as being overly prepared.”
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