We’re over halfway through season 3 of The White Lotus and, as with ever show we get hooked on, we can’t stop googling the stars of the show trying to find out everything we can about them – and one thing shocked us.
Of course, the current season based in Thailand stars the likes of Jason Isaacs, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sam Nivola, Aimee Lou Wood and BLACKPINK rapper LISA, but it was Sam Rockwell’s surprise guest appearance in episode five which got us googling.
Rockwell, 56, portrayed a character called Frank who is an old friends of Walton Goggins’ character Rick, handing over a mysterious black duffel bag to him.
‘I wanted to bring you what you asked for,’ Rockwell’s character said. ‘Hope you don’t have to use that.’
And while many were guessing what was in the contents of the bag, we were trying to work out where we’d seen Rockwell before.
It turns out he has starred in Iron Man 2 and Don Verdean – both alongside his longtime partner Leslie Bibb, 50, who is currently playing Kate in the current season of The White Lotus.
The pair met back in October 2007 when Rockwell was filming Frost/Nixon, with Bibb admitting she fell in love just three weeks after their first date. Their first joint acting rolls came in Iron Man 2 in 2010, where Rockwell portrayed Justin Hammer and Bibb played Christine Everhart.
Their second project together, Don Verdean, was released in January 2015, with Rockwell playing the titular character and Bibb played Joylinda Lazarus. In 2017, they starred in a third movie together, with Bibb starring as Madeline and Rockwell as Officer Witt in The Dark Of Night.
Fans believed the couple had secretly got married in August 2017 when Bibb captioned a photo of them together as The Rockwells, but a marriage was never confirmed. Five months later, when asked what keeps their relationship alive, they joked, ‘Communiction and good sex.’
In October 2023, Bibb took to Instagram to share an adorable post marking 16 years together. She wrote, sweet sixteen sammy ...was this from the first year, maybe the second, who knows we were babies and all the time is flying by and blurring into one helluva a ride with you...i feel very lucky to get to love this human and even luckier to be loved by him...give someone you [heart] a squeeze today and look them in the eye and tell them how you feel about them...it does the body good..’
Keeping Rockwell’s appearance in The White Lotus a secret, Bibb uploaded a photo of the pair ‘reuniting’ after she returned home from filming the season, with nobody knowing he had been to Thailand to film it with her.
She said, ‘reunited... and it feels so good... sometime rules have to be broken and our three week rule had to be three months because of our work schedules and gawddamn nothin' feels as good as being back with #sammyrocks...’
The White Lotus is available to stream on HBO and Sky Atlantic
Samuel McManus is a senior content creator for Bauer Media, writing celebrity news and features across five of the company’s brands – heat, Closer, Grazia, Bella and Yours. Samuel has worked at Bauer Media since November 2024.