The White Lotus: Theo James checks in to play nightmare of a hotel guest
It’s time to check in to The White Lotus again and meet the new guest you’re going to love to hate: a hedge fund manager played by Theo James.
‘I love coming to The White Lotus. I always have a memorable time,” Jennifer Coolidge’s character Tanya McQuoid says in the opening minutes of the first episode of season two of HBO’s The White Lotus, streaming now on Binge.
And memorable it certainly was. Remember the events of the television sensation of 2021? The miniseries famously conceived of as a quarantine project by the head honcho at HBO, who charged creator Mike White – comedian, actor, writer, director, satirist extraordinaire – with coming up with a series that could be filmed in a bubble in Hawaii. The result was The White Lotus, which followed a cast of despicable hotel guests, and the frenetic staff members charged with catering to their every whim, on a sunny vacation in picturesque Maui. Coolidge’s Tanya was one such guest, a wealthy woman on a mission to scatter the ashes of her late mother, who toys with the idea of opening a spa with Belinda, an employee played by Natasha Rothwell, before being distracted by a romance with another guest, Greg (Jon Gries).
Alongside Tanya, there was a newlywed couple learning too much about each other’s foibles, a family whose frustrations with each other come spectacularly to the surface – played by Connie Britton, Steve Zahn, Sydney Sweeney and Fred Hechinger – and, presiding over them all, resort manager Armond, a twisted stress ball of a man just begging for an excuse to burn the whole place down. For his teetering-on-the-edge performance, and in particular one memorable scene in which he squeezed out a defecation into the suitcase of a nightmare guest in a fit of righteous vindication, Australian actor Murray Bartlett was awarded the Emmy for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama. (He also, spoiler alert, dies at the very end of season one.)
It was all so memorable that for season two of the series, Tanya checks in again, this time at a White Lotus resort perched on a sun-drenched clifftop in Taormina, Sicily. Aside from Tanya and Greg, who begin season two in the throes of marriage crisis, this new brace of episodes streaming weekly on Binge introduce us to a fresh cast of characters – and at least one new dead body, a mystery teased in the opening moments of episode one when a guest is discovered floating near the shore.
There are three generations of men from an Italian American family trying to smooth over the sins of the father, and the father before him, on one last family holiday abroad. They connect with Tanya’s harried assistant Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), a millennial with a wardrobe of dopamine dressing looks and a creeping sense of existential dread.
Then there’s Harper (Aubrey Plaza) and Ethan (Will Sharpe), a married couple suddenly extremely wealthy courtesy of a Silicon Valley windfall, on holiday with another couple they don’t know or even like that much at all, Daphne (Meghann Fahy) and her husband Cameron (Theo James), Ethan’s roommate from college. James strides into the series in a lurid orange polo and white chinos, a hedge fund bro “dealing with a bunch of bogus claims” pertaining to his behaviour in the workforce. He’s appalling. He’s fascinating. He is, naturally, because he is played by Theo James, very sexy. He’s the one character in this season of The White Lotus that you’re going to want to keep your eye on.
“He’s a derivation of a finance guy that we’ve all met before – love them or hate them or mainly just dislike them,” James says. “But we wanted to try and subvert that as much as possible, try and not give you a person that you’re expecting.” James’s take on the character was to constantly keep the audience on their toes: in one breath, he’ll declare that “everybody cheats” on their partner while in another he’s tearing up about the birth of his youngest child.
Like James’s most recognisable roles – the gone-too-soon Turkish Attache Kemal Pamuk on Downton Abbey, Jane Austen heartthrob Sidney Parker in Sanditon, the enigmatic end-of-the-world saviour Four in the dystopian Divergent franchise – Cameron’s handsomeness is a tool, deployed sparingly for good and mainly for pure evil. “He might have worldviews that you wouldn’t perhaps agree with,” James sums up, politely – we’ll say! – “but he’s charming and disarming and a fun time. And if he wasn’t that, then you would just completely dislike the guy from the get go.”
Casting James, then, as the “charming and disarming” nightmare of a hotel guest you can’t seem to avoid at the breakfast buffet is a stroke of genius. Because James is charming to a fault, and nothing at all like his onscreen alter ego. We’re speaking on a very global Zoom call: James in Los Angeles, a little late because he’s just done the preschool run with his two-and-a-half year old daughter, and myself from London. We work out that I’m staying in the same area where James used to live, going to the same pubs and restaurants that James and his wife, the actor Ruth Kearney, were regulars at.
James is curious and chatty in a way that actors usually aren’t, which you can chalk down to his antipodean origins. His father is Greek by way of New Zealand, and two of James’s siblings have lived in Australia for the better part of a decade. You can even hear a slight Kiwi twang in his voice – it comes out in James’s vowels, just wait till you hear him say the word ‘discombobulating’. “We love Australia as a family and feel very connected to it,” he shares. Christmas in Perth is on the cards for the extended clan this year. Courtesy of James’s nieces and nephews in Australia, his daughter has even become a big fan of Bluey. “I’m obsessed with Bluey,” he jokes. “That’s the best kid’s TV show I’ve ever seen. I was watching an episode where (the dad) goes away for six weeks, and I was tearing up.”
Would now be a good time to talk about masculinity? Because that is a primary focus of this new season of The White Lotus. If the first focused on race, and the insidiousness of colonial damage, then season two is all about sex, baby. Under creator White’s gaze, sex is both currency and competition as he zeroes in on the relationships between men and women: the way the genders communicate with and about each other, how sex changes everything (and nothing), jealousy, morality, sensuality.
Throw into the mix two Italian sex workers interacting with every character at the resort – and especially James’s Cameron – and you have a cocktail just waiting to be shaken, not stirred, under the Sicilian sun. (“I don’t lie to my wife,” Ethan tells Cameron in one scene. “Really? That’s so sweet,” Cameron replies, his pitying gaze suggesting otherwise.) It all makes for brilliantly written television, searing and revealing in equal measure. Because each of the characters, even in all their awfulness, contains “a little piece of yourself”, James suggests.
White and James talked about Cameron as an “animal”, “in the sense that he loves life and is there to take everything he can from it,” James reflects. “He doesn’t care about if he ravenously imbibes everything around him how that will affect others – including his wife.” There’s an undercurrent of competitiveness to everything Cameron does, whether it’s his relationship with Daphne, his show boat-y friendship with Ethan and especially his antagonism of Harper, who he immediately views as the albatross around his freshly very rich friend’s neck.
“It’s all about money in the end,” James sums up. “Cameron’s sense of self and masculinity is wrapped in money.”
In the first episode, Cameron completely disrobes in front of Harper, quite literally leaving it all out on the table, while borrowing a pair of swimming trunks. “He was just getting changed,” her husband suggests harmlessly, later, but Harper isn’t so sure. “Everything he does is calculated,” sums up James, of that brief, but shocking, moment of full frontal nudity. (It was also supposed to be a lot more risque. They filmed a version that was even more revealing than what ended up on screen, but it was “way too much,” James has said. “Mike (White) toned it down.”)
This kind of behaviour is all in keeping with Cameron’s particular brand of nastiness, one that mixes calculation with charm. “He’s quite cunning and quite manipulative,” says James, all of which is evoked particularly well through Cameron’s wardrobe.
Early on in the first episode, it is revealed that Cameron’s suitcase has been misplaced en route to their vacation, leading him to hit the Sicilian boutiques for a holiday makeover. “My interpretation of it initially was, you know, kind of chic suits,” James jokes. “I definitely had to lean into it.” That included burgundy brocade suit jackets, red tiger print short sets, mustard yellow Hawaiian shirts and emerald green aviators.
“Once I’d accepted that we were looking at the most outrageous costumes we could find, you know … the most expensively tacky things that we could find,” James jokes, “that feeds into his (character), he’s a fun time, but then he’s also kind of dangerous.”
In episode three, Cameron dons a silky black shirt that prompted James and White to respond: “Yeah, we like that. He looks like a snake.”
Production took place over seven months in Taormina at the San Domenico Palace, a Four Seasons resort inside a former convent, and commenced in February of this year. “Taormina in deep winter is kind of like a beautiful ghost town,” James says. Cast and crew had the run of the hotel until the resort opened up for the summer season, a novelty for James, whose previous experience with a big resort holiday was in his 20s “with an ex-girlfriend”, getting into a fight with “a bunch of Russians” after an all-inclusive vacation. Filming in Sicily for the series was a taste of the “chic” version of that kind of trip.
“Sleeping there and then shooting there,” he explains, “it felt like we were knee deep in White Lotus territory … having drinks at night at the bar and then waking up in the morning and shooting these breakfast scenes as the characters,” James continues.
“So the boundary between reality and fiction was often blurred in a kind of strange way.”
A strange, yet simultaneously enticing way. Because that was always the appeal of The White Lotus, wasn’t it? A holiday from hell that, from certain vantage points and with the right light, kind of looked like heaven. “I was doing some ADR (Additional Dialogue Replacement) two days ago for episode five, listening to a conversation that the two of them (Harper and Ethan) were having, like god, it was so real. If I heard that conversation in real life I’d want to kill those people,” James says, laughing. And who knows – by the end of The White Lotus, maybe Cameron does.
The White Lotus airs weekly on Mondays on Binge.