Welcome to The White Lotus … season three of The White Lotus is set in Thailand.Credit: HBO
The White Lotus is television’s best expression of the notion that necessity is the mother of invention. In October 2020, the first season of the HBO comedy-drama was filmed almost entirely inside the Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea, in Hawaii, a restriction forced on the production by the pandemic.
The series, which featured a bunch of wealthy, white guests including Mark Mossbacher (Steve Zahn), Kitty Patton (Molly Shannon) and Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge), and hotel manager Armond (Murray Bartlett), whose elaborate revenge on a visitor surely made it into the hospitality history books, was an instant hit.
The second season cemented the show’s place in the wider culture, sending Tanya to her doom at another fictional White Lotus resort, this one in Sicily, in the south of Italy. “These gays, they’re trying to murder me!” she said in her final hours, at least ensuring Coolidge’s performance an afterlife among television’s most quotable, characters.
Meet the Ratliffs: Timothy (Jason Isaacs), Victoria (Parker Posey), Saxton (Patrick Schwarzenegger), Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) and Lochlan (Sam Nivola).Credit: HBO
Shifting the story for the third season to another White Lotus resort, this one in Ko Samui, in Thailand, writer and director Mike White promised it would be “longer, bigger and crazier”. Only six of eight episodes have been screened to media and let’s just say he does not underdeliver.
The show’s vacation setting works, says Carrie Coon, who plays Laurie, one of a group of three successful women on a girlfriends’ getaway at the White Lotus in the third season, because “Mike loves the idea that people, stepping outside their lives, [discover that] wherever you go, there you are.
“All their [emotional] stuff is coming with them,” Coon says. “They don’t have the distraction of their work and their home, and so they’re forced to confront themselves in these settings. That’s exactly what the show is designed to do.”
The new season begins, as with its predecessors, with the arrival of a new group of guests. They include the trio of lifelong friends Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), Kate (Leslie Bibb) and Laurie (Coon), and the sullen, mysterious Rick Hatchett (Walton Goggins), with girlfriend Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) in tow.
Walton Goggins as Rick Hatchett in season three of The White Lotus.Credit: HBO
There is also the wealthy Ratliff family: sedative-chugging Victoria (Parker Posey), corporate predator husband Timothy (Jason Isaacs), and their adult children, the overconfident Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), listless Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) and shy Lochlan (Sam Nivola).
If the preceding seasons of the show tackled themes including money, power and privilege (season one), and sexual jealousy, adultery and utility (season two), then the third season is about spirituality and death, says Coon.
“There’s a reason why we’re in a Buddhist country. Mike is asking the question that Buddhism asks, the precept is that there is suffering and there is an end of suffering, and all the people are suffering and some of them don’t know to what extent they’re suffering,” Coon says.
Jason Isaacs as Timothy Ratliff in season three of The White Lotus.Credit: HBO
“What Mike, as a storyteller, understands is that it’s our stories that trap us. All of these people are trafficking in their stories and re-entrenching in their stories, and it’s causing suffering and pain for them and for the people around them.
“From his work on [mental health comedy-drama] Enlightened, you know Mike is a spiritual guy. So he’s always dealt with these themes of spirituality, but also satire. That’s what makes it so delicious to watch because it is ultimately a satire of these people too.”
The friendship of Jaclyn, Kate and Laurie plays almost like an anti-Sex and the City. These are three lifelong friends who have each other’s backs, except when they don’t. When one is absent, the other two fall into a shorthand of light conversational backstabbing against the absent third.
The Real Housewives of the White Lotus: Carrie Coon as Laurie, Michelle Monaghan as Jaclyn and Leslie Bibb as Kate.Credit: HBO
Coon describes it as “the horrible truth” of female friendship. Bibb concurs. “I think it’s honest,” Bibb says. “The friendship group is well intended. I don’t think they think they’re stirring the pot. In the moment, Kate’s really worried about Laurie, or we’re worried about Jacqueline – it’s well intended and then it goes a little left.”
Bibb, who compares the dynamic of the three women to the dynamic of the women of the The Real Housewives franchises, believes White is writing a commentary on the kind of competitiveness entrenched in some friendships from childhood.
“It’s been with them since they were kids, and it circles back, but I also think Mike’s talking about who we were and who we’ve become, and can we all accept each other for who we’ve become, even if it’s different from who we were,” Bibb says.
Natasha Rothwell in a scene from The White Lotus.Credit: AP
Again, no spoilers, but what becomes immediately clear is that while these three women have known each other forever, their lives have gradually pulled them apart. As life, politics and relationships find their way onto the breakfast table, they realise they are actually very different women. “Can you forgive things and just come together because there’s a genuine love between these friends?” asks Bibb.
And there is another lesson in Buddhism, says Coon. “The comparing mind, that that’s a source of pain,” she says. “Whenever you’re comparing yourself to someone, you will find yourself wanting, or you’ll be putting yourselves above yourself above them in some way. Neither one of those places is a very generous place to live from, and Mike really understands that.”
The third series was filmed in Thailand over nearly seven months; for most of that, the cast and crew were living inside Four Seasons resorts in Bangkok, Ko Samui and Chiang Mai.
The White Lotus creator Mike White.Credit: Jason Yokobosky/HBO
That production model – to live and film in the same location – is rare. The most memorable example might be when Kenneth Branagh took the cast of Much Ado About Nothing to live and film in the 14th-century villa Vignamaggio in Italy in 1993.
“It’s one of those unique projects where you’re in one way or another forced to all live together at this hotel; you’re 15 to 20 hours away from home and this is who and what becomes your family,” says Patrick Schwarzenegger, who plays Saxon Ratliff.
“It really felt like, at least in the beginning, that we were on a family vacation,” Schwarzenegger adds. “We were doing everything together, we were eating our breakfast and our lunch and our dinner together, we were going to the pool, we were going on these excursions out on the boat. It really added to the depth of creating that family dynamic.”
Then it all turns into “summer camp meets Lord of the Flies,” says Jason Isaccs, who plays Timothy, the patriach of the Ratliff family. “There’s a chance for a real bonding, there’s also a chance to fall out with people,” Isaacs says. “It’s all the good and all the bad of a large, loving, sometimes dysfunctional family. There is an off-camera White Lotus as well as an on-camera White Lotus, just with fewer body bags.”
Patrick Schwarzenegger as Saxton Ratliff in season three of The White Lotus.Credit: HBO
Isaacs believes the series taps into the “eat the rich” idea, in which the everyday lives of wealthy families and individuals are exposed as flawed and miserable. It can be seen in films, such as Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness, and on television in everything from the 1980s soaps Dynasty and Dallas, to reality TV franchises such as The Real Housewives, and, more recently, shows such as Billions, Downton Abbey and Succession.
“The wealth gap in the world has grown exponentially worse since COVID-19, and it’s always been the case that soaps, in America at least, were about rich people having terrible lives,” Isaacs says.
“Right now there are people who are worth almost US$1 trillion each, who are running countries. And I think we like to see that their lives are not as perfect as we imagine, and we like to see some kind of natural justice played out.”
The Real Housewives … the inspiration for The White Lotus’s fractured female friendships?Credit: Fred Hayes/Bravo
Equally, however, there is still some relatability to be found, Isaacs says. “There isn’t anything generic about any of the characters, and this family isn’t like any family. It’s like the Ratliffs, [but] people will recognise bits of themselves in the dynamic between the siblings and the parents, or they’ll recognise bits of themselves between the friendships of the women.
“Everything Mike does is recognisably human, but also utterly specific,” Isaacs adds. “I don’t know that anyone will see themselves completely.”
Adds Schwarzenegger: “Mike writes these really fascinating, yet messed up, dysfunctional characters that are really fun and interesting to watch because you can’t wait to see where are they going to go, what’s going to happen to them, who are they going to cross paths with and what could possibly go wrong.”
Natasha Rothwell, who played White Lotus staffer Belinda Lindsey in the first season and returns for the third, describes the show as one which “punches up and doesn’t punch down. It’s fun to take the elite to task in such fun and interesting ways.”
The most complex dimension of the series is that, like Succession, it is intended as a satirical comedy-drama. But, as with Succession, and perhaps because it involves themes such as murder and revenge, the audience seem to take it, for the most part, as serious drama with some amusing quirks.
“Satire and reality aren’t as parallel as they used to be,” Rothwell says. “People day to day are seeing how farcical and satirical real life is. So it’s not surprising to me at all that people, when they embark on that slippery slope of escapism, really do come to believe what they’re seeing has more fact than fiction.
“When you turn on the news these days, it feels like satire, so I do think that they’re not wholly to blame for not being in on the joke from the beginning,” Rothwell adds.
“But I think it’s powerful, no matter your entry point. Even if you’re watching it through a satirical lens, or if you’re seeing it more as a documentary, it has a point of view. It has something to say and it’s moving and compelling, and I don’t think there’s anyone in the world that can do that like Mike White.”
The White Lotus will stream weekly on Binge from Monday, February 17.