Italian actress (Sabrina Impacciatore) improvised one of the most famously funny lines in The White Lotus Season 3, telling Jennifer Coolidge’s gussied-up character that she looked like “Peppa Pig.” The comedian told NBC Insider that she brought her improvisation skills to Peacock’s new mockumentary sitcom, The Paper, taking her cast mate Duane R. Shepard, Sr., who plays Barry, by surprise in one hilarious scene from Episode 9, “Matching Ponchos.”
Impacciatore plays chaotic Managing Editor Esmeralda Grand on The Paper. And while there are plenty of audacious characters roaming the show’s Toledo Truth Teller offices — including prowling Brit supervisor Ken Davies (Tim Key) — by Season 1’s penultimate episode, “Matching Ponchos,” you’d be hard-pressed not to classify Esmeralda the most consistently jaw-dropping character on the show.
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Whether she’s claiming that television actor Josh Holloway is actually her internet boyfriend “Jarson” or she’s trying to steal a commercial audition from her son Matteo, Esmeralda operates without shame or embarrassment…ever.
While American audiences may know Impacciatore from her Emmy-nominated role as Valentina on The White Lotus, her work in The Paper playing Esmeralda Grand is about as fearless as it gets. NBC Insider asked the actress about how she was able to throw herself into Esmeralda with such abandon, and the scene she loved most in “Matching Ponchos.”
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The actor who plays Barry actually fell out of his seat when Sabrina Impacciatore kissed him
To say Esmeralda Grand is all impulse and ego might actually be an understatement. Unhappy about being replaced as head of the TTT by Ned Sampson, she spends half her time this season trying to sandbag all of his initiatives, and the other half chasing whatever she’s personally obsessed about.
Mare and Esmeralda talking on The Paper Season 1 Episode 8.
She’s an outrageous character, so we asked Impacciatore how she was able to read a Paper script and work out how to play Esmeralda?
“What saved my life is to remember that I’m working with geniuses,” she said with candor about The Paper’s co-creators. “Greg Daniels is a genius and Michael Koman, to me, the same. So I felt so safe that I could finally go nuts.”
“I told to myself, ‘Sabrina, forget about dignity. Forget about being a woman, or being a human being. Just go crazy wild!'” she laughed.
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Impacciatore cited one of her favorite examples in “Matching Ponchos,” where Esmerelda spends the entire episode angry with Barry (Duane R. Shepard Sr.), the senior reporter on staff, for showing up as the lead in her nightly, spicy dreams. Openly hostile to the confused man, she finally aims to exorcise her brain from its pining by passionately kissing a surprised Barry at his desk.
Adam (Alex Edelman) and Ned (Domhnall Gleeson) throw their hands up as Barry (Duane R. Shepard) sits stoically on The Paper 103.
“When I kissed Barry, that was improvisation,” she said of her impulse on how to play that hilarious, extreme Esmeralda moment. “And in real life, I almost killed him because I had so much energy. I jumped at him and I took him out of guard,” she laughed. “He falls down from the seat and the seat broke, and everybody was laughing.”
She lamented that the take didn’t make it into the final cut of the episode. “Too bad, because that would have been a couch moment,” she teased. “I just went wild, so it’s very refreshing to play a character like this.”
All 10 episodes of The Paper Season 1 are now available on Peacock.
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