The actress Leslie Bibb cuts a figure like the aerodynamic swoosh of a Brancusi, or a gazelle. She is five feet nine, with a blinding smile and blond hair styled in a knifelike bob—glamazon features that pair oddly with her singsongy voice. You might cast her as a cheerleader (which she played on the WB show “Popular”), or a flight attendant (the horror flick “Flight 7500”), or a country-club belle (“Palm Royale”). But Bibb, who is fifty, doesn’t like to be pigeonholed. “Somebody looks at you, puts you in a category,” she said recently. That, she thinks, is a big theme this season on “The White Lotus,” in which Bibb, Carrie Coon, and Michelle Monaghan play three gal pals vacationing in Thailand whose friendship fractures as each twosome gossips about the third. In one scene, the other two realize with horror that Bibb’s character, a Texas socialite, has become a churchgoing conservative—she may even have voted for Trump.
“It’s putting somebody in a category,” Bibb said, “instead of stopping to be, like, ‘You knew me when I was going to be the best version of myself, and now I’m this version of myself. Will you still love me?’ ” She was at a coffeehouse in the East Village; Bibb keeps an apartment downtown, with her longtime partner, Sam Rockwell, who also appears on “The White Lotus,” as a lowlife adrift in Bangkok. (The season finale airs this weekend.) The couple met in 2007, in L.A.; Bibb was having dinner at the Chateau Marmont, where Rockwell was staying while he filmed “Frost/Nixon.” “I always say we fell in love in Room 68,” she said.
Bibb grew up in Virginia, and, at sixteen, she won a modelling contest on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” “My mom sent in a couple of pictures,” she recalled. “I joke that they were the only two with my head attached, because she was a terrible photographer.” Bibb got a contract with Elite Model Management and spent a week in New York, where her world opened up. Two years later, she dropped out of college and moved to East Sixteenth Street. She posed for catalogues and for Seventeen, but she treated modelling as a springboard for acting. As she left the coffeehouse and walked down Second Avenue, people gasped at the sight of her. “This ‘White Lotus’ thing is wild,” she said.
At Dashwood Projects, a gallery on East Fourth, she greeted Philip Huang, a designer who splits his time between Bangkok and Bushwick. Huang, himself a runway model, took an indigo-dyeing workshop in 2014, then spent two years, with his wife, learning Indigenous methods from the grandmothers of northeastern Thailand. He opened his eponymous label in 2016; his tie-dyed indigo socks sold like hotcakes during the pandemic. Huang has a friend in common with Mike White, and in Thailand he offered dyeing lessons to the cast. Bibb took one there, along with her co-star Aimee Lou Wood, and had cajoled him into another.
As Huang explained, Indigofera tinctoria has been cultivated for millennia; it was once used as currency, or “blue gold.” “We take all the branches and the leaves and put it in one big barrel,” he said. “Then we add a burnt seashell to it, which makes it alkaline, like a pickling lime.” Indigo paste was fermenting in a plastic vat, to which he’d added apple cider and a shot of vodka. (“It pretty much lives off sugar and alcohol, like us.”) It had a nice, musky smell. Huang gave Bibb a white T-shirt and some twine and showed her how to tie the fabric into a sausage shape. Then he instructed her to plunge the shirt in a bucket of cold water, “to open up the fibres.”
“So crazy that we did this in Bangkok, and now we’re doing it in the East Village!” Bibb said. She dipped the shirt in the indigo until it turned chartreuse, then placed it on a silver tray in the sun, where it oxidized into a deep blue. In Thailand, Huang had given a lesson to Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sam Nivola, and Sarah Catherine Hook, who play siblings on the show. “Does Patrick talk about food all the time?” he asked. “He was looking at a pile of rubber bands and said, ‘That looks like pasta. I’m so hungry right now.’ ”
“That kid eats, like, two breakfasts,” Bibb said. “All he thinks about is food.” After a second indigo dip, she rinsed her shirt three times in clean water and once with vinegar, to neutralize the pH level. Finally, she snipped off the twine and unfurled her shirt, which had a trippy striped pattern.
“I love the sausage! ” Bibb squealed. She had blue splotches on her forearms and jeans, but she was giddy. “Sam and I just bought a house upstate, and I want to wear my new shirt in my back yard with my dog, with Sam, in late afternoon,” she said, in a reverie. ♦
