Interview: Leslie Bibb Talks Dinah and Fractured Beauty on ‘Palm Royale’

Apple TV+’s Palm Royale has wealth, glamour, and secrets all wrapped up in a shiny vintage package. Based on the book Mr. and Mrs. American Pie by Juliet McDaniel, the show captures the golden age of Palm Beach in the 1960s, with all the dazzling riches of the haves (and the wannabe-haves) while exposing the simmering tensions of class, gender, and social ambition beneath its glittery surface. Sun-kissed women jockey for power and acceptance in the town’s exclusive social scene, and we can’t stop watching. We recently sat down with Leslie Bibb on Zoom to chat about her role on the show.

On Palm Royale, Bibb plays Dinah Donahue, the socialite who is both ambitious, cunning, and has a vulnerability too. Dinah’s marriage to politically connected Perry (Jordan Bridges) is failing; she’s pregnant with the tennis coach’s husband, yet she’s pragmatic, determined to thrive, and has her lot in the world – and that’s just in the first episode. Dinah and main character Kristen Wiig‘s Maxine Dellacorte-Simmons’s lives are entwined from early on in the show, so it was exciting to hear Bibb’s perspective on the character.

The conversation turned into a deep reflection on Dinah. Bibb shared how an older interview with actress Barbara Parkins as well as the movie All About Eve, helped her unlock her Palm Royale character. She talked about being on her toes and all the effort and preparation that went into crafting Dinah, including how for her, that meant being at the top of her game as she did scenework with Allison Janney and Wiig. The chat had us looking at the Palm Beach blue blood with a whole new level of appreciation. Read on for the interview, but beware, there are spoilers for Palm Royale ahead.

Ayla Ruby: Again, I’m very excited to talk. I love the show and I really love Dinah.

Leslie Bibb: Thank you so much. It’s so nice to hear people loving. I love her too. I love her. I mean, I know everybody sort of is like, she’s catty or she’s this, but I find her very funny and charming and honest and vulnerable and all of these things. So I really love her so much. I mean, I think she’s a good time, but also I think she’s very complicated as a character.

Ayla Ruby: She’s so brilliant too. She just sees the world as it is and is a survivor, which I also, I love too.

Leslie Bibb: Yeah, I think that’s an element too, and that’s a good word. I’m going to steal your word. She is. There’s something about, I think it’s also fun when Kristen and I are in scenes and her Maxine and my Dinah, they both have a lot of tenacity, both women, and are going to make life happen for them. But Kristen has this, or Kristen’s Maxine is just this sort of fairy tale and roses and it’s just going to happen. And Dinah’s like, no, this is how it happens. This is how the world works. It hasn’t changed, but this is what you have to do. And that sort of honesty I find very refreshing about Dinah and her lack of it being fairy tale or dreamlike.

She’s like, this is the truth. And in that truth, I think it liberates her and actually gives her power. And so I do, I find her to be such a survivor. Especially in that time. That time is so interesting. Women couldn’t even have checkbooks. You couldn’t have a checking account. It was always like your husband and not, it’s so insane. I was looking at my partner’s birth certificate. I got a copy of it and it had his mother’s name and her address, and then it’s father’s name, his address and his age. And then it had his field where he worked and what he did in the field, but it didn’t have that for the woman.

Ayla Ruby: Oh, wow.

Leslie Bibb: Because she was just a mother. And I was like, wow. It was so fascinating to me. And it wasn’t considered weird, it was just what it is. You’re a mother.

Ayla Ruby:That kind of blows my mind and I’m going to need to sit with that for a little bit.

Leslie Bibb: And he was born in 1968.

Ayla Ruby: So it’s the same time period [as Palm Royale] too.

Leslie Bibb: Same time period, which is what this thing that I keep talking about of I think for me with Dinah, and it’s great because I feel like people got it, so I feel like maybe I did it. What was so scary about playing her, or intimidating maybe, was making sure that, for me, I think great comedy comes from great pain. Comedy is not just this, you’ve got to have all the pain underneath it because that’s why it’s funny. That’s why it can be, there’s a darkness underneath it. And I felt with Dinah there was, she had, her furnace always had to be stoked.

There was always a low rumbling of, even though she covers it, but fear and anxiety. And she’s quite vulnerable, but she will never let anybody see that because it’s too, she could lose too much. But underneath, there’s all this fire that’s being stoked, so then it’s covered by this face, that’s being covered by, everything’s fine, everything’s great. And that felt really hard to do, to make sure, to find those moments where you saw her mask crack or shift and then her put it back on and do that. So it was intimidating to do, but I’m happy when people sort of get her and understand her, and then I’m like, okay, maybe I did it. Maybe I did it with her.

Ayla Ruby: So with all of that, she’s just this fully fleshed out person and so much of it is because of these choices that you’ve made as an actress to bring her to life with everything you were just talking about. How did you approach that? How did you get into the mindset of her because … Even your explanation of who she is and not letting her mask slip and all of this, it’s just such a brilliant way of putting who she is.

Leslie Bibb: So with my scripts, when I open, if you open my script, it looks like a serial killer. It’s just like so many notes. And then sometimes the notes, I’m constantly, I’ll sit at a table and I’ll work on it all the time. And there’s a lot of daydreaming. There’s a lot of things that I, references to movies, references to relationship. Obviously the first thing I did is I got into the whole Slim Aarons world, opening those books. And to me that was something because it was like beautiful, what is it? Beautiful people doing beautiful things in beautiful places. That was always his mantra with this. And so I got all of these books and I remember thinking, I think something looks broken in them, even though they’re so beautiful, but there’s a tilt. There’s a Christmas tree in the middle of the pool, and it seems beautiful, but it’s wrong.

In its beauty, there’s something grotesque to it, to me. There’s something fractured. That’s what I saw when I looked at it. And so I immediately saw people and I was like, oh, what are their secrets? What are their facades of, this is the world, this is what I show you. Welcome to my house, this is my fridge. I have a fridge. Why? I don’t really cook, but this is the thing. I mean, that’s what Dinah would do. We have help. We do this. And so that world of Slim Aarons, and what I got struck with was one thing. I saw this interview, and I’m probably going to screw up her name so I’m going to Google it really fast. I said it the other day and I was like, oh, I’m such an idiot, I probably said it wrong. Is it, Barbara Parkins or Barbara Perkins from…? It’s Barbara Parkins. I said, Perkins. But it’s Barbara Parkins.

Ayla Ruby: Okay.

Leslie Bibb: I said Perkins at that other thing. Sorry. Sorry, Barbs. But Barbara Parkins who did Valley of the Dolls. And then she did, she was on Peyton Place, and then she went and did Valley of the Dolls. So I watched Valley of the Dolls, but it didn’t really… It’s a great movie for kitsch, but it didn’t really unlock something. But I saw this interview that Barbara Parkins did with this woman, and it was so… What was being said underneath, what was being said, was so fascinating to me. Barbara was so charming and so lovely, but really was like a boundaried woman with this interviewer. This interviewer also was kind of catty, but still everything being done with a smile and they were doing it from the set, and these men were walking across. Nobody was like… It was again, what am I going to show the world? And what’s the real thing?

And I saw Barbara trying to find her place, and this woman kept wanting to put her in a box, and Barbara kept doing like, I’m not in that box. I’m not in that box. And that battle, there’s something for me when I watched this interview that clicked in me, in my body, in my spirit for Dinah. So I can’t tell you exactly what it was, but there was that interview. All About Eve, the movie All About Eve, because I just immediately felt, I don’t know, in my life, I come from sisters, I’m sort of fascinated with relationships with sisters. It felt like a relationship between sisters and then All About Eve is always a jockeying for power, even though they’re not, but one of them who’s going to be the star, who’s going to be the star. So I kept looking at Lee Radziwill and Jackie Kennedy because I was like, Lee Radziwill was so of her own power, but you’re in the shadow of our version of Princess Diana of Camelot.

And I thought, I think I was like, how did they do it? So I think it was like, I looked at their relationship. I didn’t take anything from it, but I just sourced pictures of them and again, started daydreaming about what that feels like, what that power struggle feels like. And because it really felt important, the relationship between Kristen in the first few episodes, I think Dinah thought she was on one trajectory, and then this hillbilly comes in, and she’s so ruthless, but I think she’s a more, I say to her, I can’t tell if you’re a hillbilly or the most ruthless woman in all of Palm Beach. I don’t know who you are.

I mean, is she a grifter or is she… What is she? And so that relationship between those sisters was fascinating to me. The relationship in All About Eve was fascinating to me. The Slim Aarons and the secrets and the cover felt very interesting to me. And that Barbara Parkins interview, there was something about it that suddenly my engines started to rev. And then you just watch stuff. And then sometimes you sort of have an overall idea of the character. And then within each scene it changes. Because that’s how life is. It’s never one clear line to the finish line. Everything changes. And I think in a sense, sometimes there was a moment in the pilot where my character says to Kristen’s character, “You may be the truest friend I’ve ever had.”

And to me, that was true. To me, it was so heartbreaking that the mask was down, that you saw how tired this woman is from playing the game, how exhausted she is at having to fucking deal with these men and their whims, and I have no power and I don’t know what to do about it, and I have nobody who I can just relax with. So she felt very coiled to me. Also, a Jack-in-the-Box was something that felt very, very right for her because she just turns on a dime with, really turns on a dime in any scene. And so yeah, I felt like there was a thing that there should be a coiledness to Dinah at every moment. And that at any moment if somebody just went, you could spring and whatever that trigger was, that’s what would happen.

Ayla Ruby: So you mentioned something about that you were very much into relationships, and you mentioned sisters as a thing. Do you see the relationship between Maxine and Dinah as almost that push-and-pull?

Leslie Bibb: Yeah, it feels sister like. It feels like, if they could and then you have within the bigger group that feels like sisters. You have Allison, you have Claudia, you have Julia Duffy, you have all of these women. Because at the end of it, if these women could just put down their swords and unite and become a sense of community, they would have so much power but they don’t. They feel like it’s every man for themselves or every woman for herself. And the show is riddled with secrets. Everybody’s hiding something. Everybody’s got, so then you get into scenes and you have your own stuff that you’re working on, but then you have to cue up your listening to make sure that you’re really focused and hear because I don’t know how Allison’s going to play something, and I know her secrets because of I’ve read the script, but you have to always remember in the scene to be listening for whatever clue could inform something, because that’s what Dinah would be doing. It’s like chess with these people. They’re all Bobby Fischer. It ain’t checkers in Palm Beach.

So it felt like this sorority, this sisterhood, this community that they had. But for me, yeah, Maxine and Dinah felt sisterly. It felt, and I think they both need each other, but they’re sort of incapable because Maxine’s not clean of guilt. I mean, she does shifty things. She does things that aren’t on the up and up. So you have this group, this thing. So I don’t know. The thing with Jackie Kennedy and Lee Radziwill, because they both have something to offer those women’s and they’re both very powerful women. And by the way, Maxine is very powerful and Dinah can learn something from her. And Maxine could learn a thing or two from me. So it felt interesting to look at those. I don’t know those relationships. I don’t know how it changed something. But for me, the way I work, I sort of, it’s the daydream and the fantasy and that I pull from movies or TV or something I’ve read or something, or music. And then when I get on set, I usually have earbuds in my ear and…

I’ve done all the work. I have sort of an arsenal of ideas of, well, if Kristen goes right, I can go right with her. But if she goes right, maybe I’ll go left. But we’ll see what happens. Or maybe because you have to, I already needed Dinah to be coiled, and I also wanted, you’ve got to be on the balls of your feet when you’re working with somebody like Allison Janney or Kristen Wiig, because you never know where they’re going to go. And so if you’re not ready, you’re fucked. You’re going to be left behind. And it’s too fun to be left behind when you work with women like this.

Ayla Ruby: Not only them, but also Carol Burnett. And I know we’re getting close on time too.

Leslie Bibb: Yeah. Yeah, Carol I only had one scene with. So in that one scene, I remember the director came over and she was like, “That’s so funny, you’re curtsying to her.” And I said, “What?” She goes, “Oh, you don’t know what you’re doing?” And I was like, “No, what am I doing?” She was like, “Oh, you’re bowing to her. You do this weird curtsy to her.” And I was like, “Oh, I had no idea.” But I even think that I was so, that was almost like, that’s what I want to do every time I see her is I want to bow down to her. And so it was funny that somehow it was coming out in the scene that I didn’t even know was happening. So yeah, that’s the fun thing about acting. When you do all the work, you have all the stuff, your toolbox full of stuff, you go to work, you open it, and then you forget it all and you see what happens between action and cut.

If you don’t remember what happened, it’s so exciting. That’s what I always want. I hate when a take ends. I’m always fascinated when people are like, “Well, that was good.” And I’m like, “How do you know?” If you know it was good, you weren’t in the scene. You should be in a fever pitch afterwards and not know. I’m not that actor. I have no idea what is good, what is bad, what I did. Thank God for script supervisors, because I don’t know what hand I picked up the fork with or when I moved my purse or anything like that.

Ayla Ruby: The unsung heroes of continuity.

Leslie Bibb: By the way, very important people on a set. Save your ass every time.

Ayla Ruby:  Is there anything you want people to know before about the show or about what you’re working on next before we go?

Leslie Bibb: No, I’m just doing White Lotus right now, which is really exciting. And yeah, no, that’s it.

Ayla Ruby: Perfect. Well, thank you so much.

Leslie Bibb: How very exciting. Thank you so much, Ayla, it’s nice to meet you.

Ayla Ruby: Nice to meet you. Have a great day.