The aesthetic and psychic differences between New York City and Los Angeles are well documented. There’s the vertical thrust of the former — all skyscrapers, concrete and steel — versus the sunbleached, low-slung sprawl of the latter; becoming versus discovery; urgency versus myth-making. According to Leslie Bibb, there’s another obvious point of difference: event catering. When the actress throws a party in New York she’s “eaten out of house and home”. In Los Angeles? The spread remains essentially untouched. Bibb recalls with evocative profanity a New Year’s Eve party she hosted years ago in LA (along with party food, Bibb is partial to colourful language) during which she found the actress Minnie Driver standing alone, tucking into the spread. “I said, ‘Thank you for eating. I always make this much, and nobody eats in Los Angeles.’ ” She says Driver advised her that if you want to be invisible at a party in LA, “just stand by the food table.”
Feeding people is important to Bibb (“I’m Southern,” she says by way of explanation) and she has her good-time formula down to a fine art: food, a well-stocked bar, great music and dancing. You get the impression that Bibb’s instinct to anticipate others’ needs, to over-cater and overthink, is more ambient than performative.
Our interview takes place in her waterside hotel room at Sydney’s Park Hyatt hotel, and after answering the door (big smile, big hug, a tan pinstripe Victoria Beckham suit) she offers no fewer than four different types of water and soda — as if, in that moment, hydration might be the most vital gift she could give.
Bibb knows she’s a bit of a Julie McCoy, the sunny cruise director from “The Love Boat”. “I do love creating an experience,” she says, a residue of a childhood in which she’d often spy on her mother’s Christmas parties at their home in Virginia. Bibb recounts the sound of the adults downstairs, of a house feeling full with laughter, stories, drinking and dancing — learning, even at a young age, that there’s a kind of magic in curating something special for others.
Mike White, who directed Bibb in the third season of his HBO juggernaut “The White Lotus”, recalls her being connective tissue for the cast during the seven-month shoot in Thailand. “Socially, she was kind of a major gravitational pull for the other actors,” he tells me on a phone call from New York. “She just takes care of everybody, and she’s very fun.”
Wearing an Alex Perry bodysuit, alexperry.com.au; Esse bralette, stylist’s own; Acne Studios pants, acnestudios.com; Cartier necklace, cartier.com.au; and Gucci shoes, gucci.com. Makeup: Armani Beauty, giorgioarmanibeauty.com.au.
It was Bibb who first suggested the cast throw a party for the crew of “The White Lotus” towards the end of the season’s filming run. She texted her colleagues, then convinced the show’s producers to get involved. “I was like, ‘Great! We’re going to have food and cocktails and — and can you get us DJ equipment? I’ve got the DJ,’ ” she says. (The DJ was her co-star Michelle Monaghan’s husband, Peter White.) And it was Bibb who, on the set of the 2023 film “About My Father”, coaxed her co-star Robert De Niro to join an allcast dinner. Ordinarily, “I think people treat him like a Fabergé egg,” she told Kelly Ripa on a 2024 episode of Ripa’s podcast, “Let’s Talk Off Camera”.
Which is all to say that Leslie Bibb is a good support. In her personal life, yes, but also in her work. Her résumé reveals a reliable screen presence of nearly three decades and her showreel shifts believably from broad to restrained, bright to biting, sugar cut with steel.
But in show business, or really any industry, there is a distinct difference between working steadily and being seen, and Bibb’s career has often been about standout performances in smaller films, or second leads in projects that didn’t quite stick. She’s played a superhero in Netflix’s “Jupiter’s Legacy”, and put her own spin on Satan in the Melissa McCarthy-Ben Falcone series, “God’s Favorite Idiot”. She’s gone toe-to-toe with Robert Downey Jr. in the “Iron Man” franchise, was a race car WAG beside Will Ferrell in “Talladega Nights”, and made her off-Broadway debut in 2013 in Neil LaBute’s “Reasons To Be Happy”. In 2024, Vanity Fair profiled her in its “Always Great” column, a salute to Hollywood’s “greatest undersung actors”. Bibb’s got the goods — she always has had. What she hadn’t had, until recently, was the right vehicle.
Ralph Lauren blazer and pants; and Cartier watch.
Ralph Lauren blazer and pants; and Cartier watch.
But something happened in late 2023: Bibb got on a roll. She wrapped season one of Apple TV+’s “Palm Royale”, a fizzy 1960s satire set in Florida’s exclusive Palm Beach enclave, opposite Kristen Wiig, Allison Janney, Laura Dern and Carol Burnett. Her role, Dinah Donahue, a socialite whose frosting-thick veneer masks something more vulnerable, was a meal of a part. She was then whisked down to Savannah, Georgia, for Clint Eastwood’s courtroom drama “Juror #2”. Then came “The White Lotus”, a role and ripple effect that this year became less a changing tide than a tsunami of fandom. Reflecting on Bibb’s steady build to this moment, White says: “I know what it’s like to be out in the ocean for a long time and you finally get a wave.”
At 51, Bibb was suddenly everywhere. She wasn’t throwing the party anymore, she was the guest of honour. How did it feel, standing at the centre of the applause? “Oh, baby,” she says, then laughs. “I’m here for it.”
Born Leslie Louise in 1973, Bibb and her three older sisters were raised by her mother, Betty (Bibb’s father passed away when she was three) in Bismarck, North Dakota, then Richmond, Virginia. Far from her sisters in age, and other neighbourhood kids in geography, she spent a lot of time in the company of her own imagination, watching “The Carol Burnett Show” and growing enamoured with its star and her contemporaries, Tracey Ullman and Goldie Hawn.
Bibb’s professional break came at 16, after Betty sent photographs of her daughter to “The Oprah Winfrey Show” for the program’s first nationwide model search. She was crowned the winner on air by a judging panel that included Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista, and received a contract with Elite Model Management. Within two years she dropped out of the University of Virginia and packed her bags permanently for New York to pursue modelling and, her true passion, acting.
A summer intensive course at Esper Studio in Midtown cracked open her world — Bibb had found her people and her purpose. She was accepted into the studio’s two-year program and studied the Meisner acting method under Maggie Flanigan. A few small television parts and a low-budget film followed, but it was “Popular”, the teen dramedy that debuted when she was 25, that made Bibb a name (and a lifelong friend in her co-star Carly Pope). “People still stop me about that show,” she says. Though, at the time, she didn’t fully grasp what they’d landed on. “We took it for granted. You think, ‘Oh, well, this is going to happen all the time.’ And it doesn’t happen all the time.”
Acne Studios jacket; and Gucci shoes.
The work still came, though not always the recognition. And, like most actors, Bibb has had to learn to live with rejection — disappointments she now views as necessary detours. “If my every rejection led me to Mike White saying, ‘You got “The White Lotus,” ’ then I would take every rejection again,” she says.
Bibb did eventually get that call from White, via her agents. She was on location for “Juror #2” and White, already a fan of Bibb’s, had asked the show’s casting agent to invite her to audition for the part of Kate Bohr, a once politically liberal wife and mother with a newfound community in a conservative Texan church. An unexpected break in production afforded Bibb a pocket of time to prepare. Even luckier, her partner of 18 years, the Academy Award-winning actor Sam Rockwell, was scheduled to visit that week. “I said, ‘Cookie, you have to help me put this audition on tape,’ ” she says.
Rockwell and the actor Chris Messina (his friend and Bibb’s co-star on “Juror #2”) worked with Bibb on the sides. It was a long scene; the now-infamous politically charged dinner sequence between Kate and her childhood friends Jaclyn, a beautiful and vain actress, and Laurie, a down-on-her-luck lawyer, who were reuniting for a friendship “victory tour” in Thailand.
They ran it three times in Messina’s hotel room, Rockwell reading opposite. But Bibb is a “perfectionist to a fault — I’ve spent a lot of time in therapy trying to work on that trait, because really, it’s about control,” she says — and wanted more takes. She always wants more takes. “I never think we have it,” she says. “When people talk about [Stanley] Kubrick and how he would do 97 takes, I’m like, ‘Oh, that sounds fun’. He and I would get along.” Messina pushed back. “You’ve got it,” Bibb recalls him telling her. “You had it on the first one.” Her audition was “tonally perfect”, White tells me, and he cast her without a callback. Bibb was laying in her hotel bed when her agent called with the good news. She pulled the blankets over her head and screamed.
