Actress Sarah Catherine Hook on The ‘Cruel Intentions’ Reboot and ‘The White Lotus’ Season 3
It should come as no surprise that Sarah Catherine Hook has come down with a cold. The 29-year-old, camera off from her parents’ home in Montgomery, Ala., the day before Thanksgiving, has been on a worldwide journey the past year resulting from her rising profile. Around this time last year she was in Toronto at work on the Prime series version of “Cruel Intentions,” which is out now. While on a break for the holidays she learned she booked a role on the third season of “The White Lotus,” which had her flying to Thailand months later for nearly half the year. After that came Barcelona to shoot the adaptation of the Emily Henry book “People We Meet on Vacation,” North Carolina for the film “Capsized” and by then it was time to start press for “Cruel Intentions.”
“It’s been the best year of my life,” she says.
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When Hook originally heard from her manager that she had an audition for a TV version of “Cruel Intentions” she was thrilled to finally play a young Reese Witherspoon role.
“Everyone has always said that I look like her and I have always been compared to her for so long,” Hook says.
The audition, however, was for the Sarah Michelle Geller character, much to Hook’s surprise. After reading the script, she developed a gut feeling that the role was right for her — only to not win the part initially. It eventually came back around a second time, proving Hook’s gut feeling to be right all along.
“It’s funny because there’s this theme with ‘Cruel Intentions’ and ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ right now. A couple years ago, I auditioned for the TV reboot of ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ for the Glenn Close role, and had a callback,” Hook says. “So it just feels kind of written in the stars or I don’t know what, but just how it keeps coming around is what I find to be so fascinating.”
She initially approached her character, Caroline, with Geller in mind, before slowly starting to adapt her into her own.
“You kind of have to go against the tongue-in-cheek tone that they’re writing it as — it’s like they’re saying it, but they’re not being super kitschy. It’s not as camp as it may read on the paper,” Hook says of the script. “You kind of have to go against it and deliver it with a cool tone, an icy coolness. That kind of changed it for me in reading it. I was just like, ‘Oh my god, it’s even cooler now. This girl is so scary.’”
Caroline is the president of a prestigious sorority that is desperate to recruit the U.S. vice president’s daughter as a pledge. While she wasn’t in a sorority herself, growing up in Alabama meant Hook is well acquainted with Greek life.
“Coming home for Christmas from my little, weird liberal arts school in New York, all my friends would talk about was all the different sororities and fraternities. It’s such a massive deal down here,” she says.
In February, Hook will be seen in the third season of “The White Lotus,” about as hotly anticipated a project as there is at the moment.
She found out she got the part while visiting her family in Alabama last year for Christmas — though she was sworn to secrecy.
“I was in the car with my dad, and my whole team called and told me, and it was just an extremely emotional and celebratory phone call. But then they were like, ‘OK, you can’t tell anyone.’ Well, that was really hard because I was with my entire family,” she recalls.
After Hawaii and Italy, the third season is set in Thailand, where Hook lived for six months while shooting the show.
“It feels almost like a fever dream at this point,” she says. “We all had these stunning, beautiful rooms that we were living in. I felt like a princess. And I knew the second before I even got there, I was like, ‘this is going to ruin my perception of reality.’”
Hook was a shy kid who first found performing through music: She would learn things like her telephone number or the spelling of her name through song. In the eighth grade she read Kristin Chenoweth’s biography and was struck by her background in theater, film and music.
“I didn’t know people could do all of it,” she says. The book ignited an interest in opera, which Hook would go on to study in college at SUNY Purchase, “which I know sounds really random,” she says.
“But when I was in eighth grade, I decided that was going to be my college path. I really had a set plan and, weirdly, it’s all happened. I’ve somehow manifested this.”
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