Shalini Peiris, the first brown character on The White Lotus, screamed in an airport bathroom when she bagged the role

Shalini Peiris will never forget the moment she found out about her casting. The actor, born in the hill town of Kandy in Sri Lanka and currently based out of London, had just landed in the British capital after shooting in Serbia and turned on her phone to see a missed call from her manager. “I called back thinking he was going to tell me the audition hadn’t gone my way but instead he said he had good news. I was surrounded by people getting off the plane so I had to keep it together but as soon as I got off, I ran to the nearest bathroom, locked myself inside and screamed at the top of my lungs.”

For Peiris, earning a place among The White Lotus cast is a culmination of a journey that began nearly 15 years ago when, as a recent graduate in Anthropology working at the Asian Human Rights Commission in Hong Kong, she told her parents she wanted to be an actor. It’s a long-held dream that never fully left her despite her best efforts to file it away under the category of ‘unattainable childhood fantasies’.