“The White Lotus” is one of the buzziest shows of recent memory, inspiring old-school water-cooler-level discussion about who may have murdered whom and who’s the biggest jerk on a show filled with them.
Mike White’s HBO opus returns for a third season this Sunday on Crave; this time, our gaggle of terrible rich people have congregated at the White Lotus in Thailand.
We have arrogant financier Timothy (Jason Isaacs) and his snobby wife, Victoria (Parker Posey), and their three kids, Buddhist daughter Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), shy Lochlan (Sam Nivola) and the brazen ass of the season, horny bro Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger). Walton Goggins plays surly rich dude Rick, who’s growing tired of his much younger, British New Age girlfriend Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), while Carrie Coon, Michelle Monaghan and Leslie Bibb are a trio of old friends on a girls trip gunning to gossip about each other.
On the non-monster side of things, Blackpink superstar Lisa takes on her first acting role as health mentor Mook, while Tayme Thapthimthong plays security guard Gaitok. And, finally, Natasha Rothwell rejoins the cast from Season 1, playing the warm heart of the show, spa professional Belinda.
So who lives and who dies? Well, it will be a couple of months yet until we find out who makes it out of their stay at the White Lotus alive but, in the meantime, here’s a bit of behind-the-scenes gossip about what it was like shooting the new season of this hit show for seven whole months in Thailand.
Parker Posey forgot who died
Posey was so stoked to join the production over in Southeast Asia. (She was also, apparently, so funny that she consistently made her co-stars burst out laughing on set with her bonkers line readings in a drawn-out Texan drawl.) “When I heard that this was in Thailand, it was going to have this wild energy, you know. Do you know the movie ‘Apocalypto’? Did you ever see that? Yeah, it had this kind of energy and this force,” Posey said.
And even though she had read all eight episodes, she forgot who died in the end. “I was so caught up in the story and loving these characters that I didn’t want to know who died,” she said. “So, being able to create such funny, endearing, hilarious (characters) you’re really in the story, you really care about these people.”
White knew he wanted Belinda back after Season 1
During Emmys season for the first season, White was in town and asked Rothwell out to dinner, and asked if she would be interested in returning as Belinda. “And I was just like, I will absolutely follow you anywhere,” Rothwell said. “After Season 2 wrapped and he finished, he hit me up again; he had already started writing and he was like ‘Belinda is back.’ I was thrilled because I really had no expectation of Belinda coming back.”
Shooting in the tropics was wild
“We live where we film,” Rothwell revealed. “So it can all start to feel a bit like a reality show.”
White loves reality TV, Wood pointed out. “So that makes sense, you know, he’s been on two (reality shows) himself as a contestant. It can feel a bit like a reality TV show sometimes,” she said.
“Walton Goggins saw a monitor lizard eat a frog,” Posey remembered. “You hear stories of like, ‘Oh, I had this crack in the door of my room and I keep having these fantasies of what insects and what other things are getting into the room.’ It was truly exotic and that was my favourite thing. We saw the birds with the feathered heads!”
It was also absolutely sweltering. “It was extremely hot,” Schwarzenegger said. “And in the famous words of Jason Isaacs, we all stunk and smelled sweaty and gross.”
“Sometimes bunches of people crammed into a room without air conditioning and there were people mopping us down all the time or bringing us ice in between,” Isaacs remembered. “But no one really cares how the sausage is made. We got to go to Thailand for seven months. Nobody’s playing a violin for us.”
Cast members in ‘nicer’ parts sometimes got jealous of villains
So is it hard to play more reserved characters on “The White Lotus”?
“I think, for me, the challenge was like, just jealousy. I’m like, ‘Oh damn … I don’t get to be a clown like these guys, it’s not fair!’” said Hook, who plays the stubborn teen Piper. “But then it’s good to remember, everyone is a very important piece in this puzzle, and you need to have the more reserved against the zanier. I think if everyone were chaotic it might be too much.”
Pop star Lisa channelled her Blackpink experience to prepare
Born in Thailand, Lisa moved to South Korea at just 14 years old, where she found K-pop superstardom. She was happy to return to the beauty, the food, the culture of her home country — and was even able to tap into her pop-star lifestyle to create the role. “I travel a lot and I stay in many hotels! So I try to really think about that, like how the staff treated me, so I can just adapt it to the Mook character,” she said.
She also discovered a handy way to relax before a take, according to Thapthimthong. “She’s such a fun person to be around,” he said. “Before we even shoot, sometimes we’d just have a little dance to some music.”
Schwarzenegger tapped into his own experience
Schwarzenegger’s cruel, pervy yuppie continues in the grand tradition of Jake Lacy of Season 1 and Theo James of Season 2, making him an early front-runner for the most hated character of the third season. He’s perving on girls, constantly blending protein smoothies and bossing around his little brother.
“My goal was to make it so he was despicable and not a likeable character, and yet he was so ridiculous and funny and (had a) lack of filter that you kind of liked him,” Schwarzenegger said.
“No,” joked Isaacs, his onscreen father, “you failed.”
“Yeah, but I guess that did not work out,” Schwarzenegger laughed.
He was able to draw on his life as the son of one of the world’s most famous people to play up Saxon’s daddy issues (his IRL father is Arnold Schwarzenegger). “I empathized with my character of him (longing for) the relationship with his father or for approval from his father, and always trying to garner his attention and (looking) up to him,” Schwarzenegger said. “I hope that there’s that vulnerability to the character that humanizes him a little bit throughout the course of the show.”
White wants to do an all-stars season
White told Schwarzenegger that he wishes he could watch Schwarzenegger and Theo James and Jake Lacy on a vacation together. “And I think it would really be a despicable group of mayhem, that would be really funny. I think he’s toyed around with the idea; I think in Season 6 he said he wanted to do a version of a bunch of different groups from different seasons come together,” Schwarzenegger said.
