Yoga, wellness and death: check into The White Lotus
The super-rich have moved on to Thailand for the third series of Mike White’s hit thriller. Its stars talk about their trip of a lifetime.
As the tourist boat pulls in for another stay at a White Lotus super-luxury hotel, fans of the writer/director Mike White’s dazzlingly inventive satirical drama will know at least part of what’s coming. We will bear witness to death in some form before the action flashes back a week to reveal what got us there. There will be plenty of ghastly westerners we might quite like to see end up on the mortuary slab. The locals will generally be nice. There will be theorising.
Those taking their sweaty first plunge into the (for now, at least) corpse-free waters in Thailand are another eclectic bunch. The British actor Jason Isaacs demonstrates his mastery of accents as a dodgy, wealthy southern businessman called Timothy Ratliff (sharp-eared viewers might wonder if there is a moment when the accent slips – is he not all he seems?).
He is accompanied by his slightly spaced-out wife, Victoria (Parker Posey), and three teenage Ratliffs, of which Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of Arnie) is easily the most obnoxious. There is growing trouble back home for Timothy as journalists keep calling his office. Strangely, the world’s hacks haven’t cottoned on to how this hotel chain keeps producing dead bodies. Maybe they will spring into action when series four – which has already been commissioned – comes round.
Another British performer, Aimee Lou Wood, is Chelsea, a bubbly Mancunian motormouth hitched to the taciturn Rick (Walton Goggins), who adds the noxious whiff of the con artist to the jasmine-scented air. Rick doesn’t initially seem to like his girlfriend much, if the way that he keeps telling her to shut up is anything to go by. Or perhaps he just hates himself.
Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) is a television star who has come for a reunion with two old friends (played by Carrie Coon and Leslie Bibb). Behind the smiles and fakery, “the ladies” (as they were called on set) enjoy bitchy twosomes when the third person is out of the room, subtly revelling in each others’ misfortune or competitive dieting stories when they are together.
And there is at least one familiar face, Natasha Rothwell’s Belinda, the spa manager from series one who was promised so much by Jennifer Coolidge’s spaced-out heiress Tanya, but was left empty-handed when the credits rolled. She is now a guest on a professional fact-finding mission at the resort rather than greeting the high-rolling customers.
“I think the best moment for me was when we shot the arrival scene,” Rothwell, a Saturday Night Live alumna, says. “This time Belinda was on the boat … I could feel the change happening in the character for me. She’s on the boat, baby.”
Another actor delighted to be aboard is the rising British star Wood. You might assume that White had noticed her star turn in the Netflix hit Sex Education (where her character is also called Aimee), but the director, she says, hadn’t seen it, casting her instead from an audition. She found out she got the part on a night out with friends. After buying the next round, she experienced “immediate fear” of being away from home for the long shoot and the “scary pressure” of being in a show that’s such a “cultural phenomenon”.
The White Lotus has a habit of boosting careers, be it that of Coolidge, who won a Golden Globe for her performance; Murray Bartlett, the Emmy-winning suitcase-crapping hotel manager of series one; or the series two British standouts Will Sharpe, Theo James, Leo Woodall and Tom Hollander (the last winning a Screen Actors Guild award in 2023 for his role as the creepy Quentin).
Where the first series unsparingly dissected race and postcolonial guilt, series two showed new world Americans in old-world Sicily, where the abiding theme was sex and passion. White has said that the third series – mainly shot at the Four Seasons resort, Koh Samui, where rooms start at $1800 a night, and go up to $30,000 a night for a five-bedroom villa – will be a “satirical and funny look at death and eastern religion and spirituality”. This time, it is the western tendency to fetishise the east for its promise of spiritual fulfilment that falls under White’s unsparing gaze.
Wood’s Chelsea certainly seems to be into spiritual talk, but at first is largely mocked for her verbal diarrhoea. “It’s very me – I mean, I can chat,” says the 30-year-old actor with a grin. Sharing key traits with one’s character is key to the show’s vision, which is why she used her native accent, not an American one.
“I think (doing American) would have kept me at a more comfortable distance. I think I would have been able to think she is separate to me because she doesn’t speak like me. And I think that’s why Mike said, ‘Don’t do the American accent.’ This is so exposing. I am showing a part of myself through this character, and it’s vulnerable, and we’re living in the places that we film. There’s no escape. You can’t go home, you can’t step away from the experience, you’re in it the whole time.
“Mike is interested in having that really close, claustrophobic thing where lines are blurred between the fiction and the reality. Honestly, I was halfway through, and the lady doing my hair, Mia, said, ‘I don’t know if I’m talking to Chelsea or Aimee’.”
She is protective of her character and confirms my suspicions that Chelsea will surprise viewers as the show goes on. “People should listen to her a bit more … she’s quite in touch with life and how to live life. She’s not about optics, she’s not about ego. She’s about experience. She wants to live each day, properly live it. And I spoke (with White) a lot about how Chelsea and Rick are really different to the other guests that have been before at the White Lotus. They’re kind of like a weird, standalone misfit thing. There’s a line in the script – I don’t know if it’s kept in – where I say, ‘He’s pain and I’m hope, and one of us will win one day.’ What’s so funny is that she’s constantly saying that Rick is mysterious and, actually, she’s deeply mysterious herself.”
In episode two there is a passionately intimate Chelsea/Rick sex scene. Even with intimacy co-ordinators on hand, it was a tough assignment for Wood, who is more used to the comedy clinches of Sex Education. “It’s more cringe to me having to be tender and loving because that feels so private. A chaotic sex scene is silly, but there is something so vulnerable about the ‘making love’ thing,” she says. “But it was important for the character to show that Rick does actually have tenderness for her, which we might not have seen before.”
Belinda fans will be pleased to hear that there is a hint of romantic potential for her too. Once again her character offers an outsider’s perspective on the ghastliness of the ensemble, but Rothwell also points out White’s ability to “humanise the villains of the show … to see them as whole, flawed humans in a beautiful way”.
She adds: “When your nose is close to the painting, you don’t see all of the fissures in the painting. And so he pulls back and he allows you to see the truth of that experience. He’s not myopic in his view of what humanity is. I think his series is actually optimistic. Yes, there’s death every season, but I don’t think you can appreciate the sunshine without the grey. He shows the full spectrum of humanity, even the ugly, gross parts, because that is a part of what being human is.”
The pain at the heart of the three holidaying “ladies”, all well-to-do white women, is another theme of the show. Jaclyn enters the action as the top dog, not least because her fame means she is recognised by holidaymakers. Her character is summed up by Timothy’s daughter Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), a college senior who says the resort is “Disneyland for rich bohemians from Malibu and their Lululemon yoga pants”.
But there is clearly more to her and tensions look set to unravel among the trio, who, Monaghan says, were first imagined as a “big blonde blob” before the details emerged. Their meanness to each other may seem familiar, but it’s a trait Monaghan blames largely on patriarchy and male expectations.
“We’ve been conditioned socially to constantly compare ourselves to other people; we judge ourselves harshly as women,” she tells me. “That’s something that Mike was really keen to explore this season. It’s something that he’s witnessed in his own life with various female friendships.”
As usual, the intensity on set was enhanced by the cast staying in the hotel where they were filming. The three actors had rooms next to each other and enjoyed water aerobics in their downtime, adding to the feeling that their real selves and their characters were blurring, all overseen by White the impresario.
“He said, ‘I might just push you in different directions because I want to fine-tune you’,” Monaghan says. “He is kind of a maestro and we’re all, as a cast, just little instruments that he’s fine-tuning for this great, big, dark, beautiful symphony.” We’re all ears.
THE TIMES
The White Lotus season 3 starts on Binge and Foxtel on February 17.
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