Steven Prusakowski
The Directors Guild of America theater in New York was the place to be for fans of Mike White’s uber-popular HBO series The White Lotus. The evening started with a screening episode 5 “Full Moon Party” followed by an insightful Q&A with much of the ensemble cast and a show themed reception at The Russian Tea Room.
The often warm and always revealing conversations included: Jason Isaacs (Timothy), Parker Posey (Victoria), Patrick Schwarzenegger (Saxon), Sam Nivola (Lachlan), Sarah Catherine Hook (Piper), Carrie Coon (Laurie), Leslie Bibb (Kate), Walton Goggins (Rick), Sam Rockwell (Francis), and Tayme Thapthimthong (Gai-Tok).
For almost sixty minutes they unpacked all that went into their six months in Thailand that turned strangers into something very close to an actual family. The Ratliff family dynamic dominated the night, and the cast wasted no time explaining how real life bled into the fiction.
“I feel like it was probably like day one when we realized we were all living together,” Sam Nivola shared. “I feel like it’s impossible to not create a sort of proto-family when you’re all living together.” Sarah Catherine Hook picked it right up, “We had like a lot of dinners, the five of us, in the beginning. Mike (White) even said to Patrick, ‘You know, you don’t have to like eat with them every night,’ He (Patrick) was like, ”They’re my family.'” To which White responded, “‘It’s not a real family.'”
Jason Isaacs, who admitted to feeling “a bit lonely in this giant villa” while Posey and the women did water aerobics, soon found himself adopted. “My kids came out to stay and I said, ‘Let’s go out to eat, let’s invite my kids.’ And they were like, ‘We’re your kids, dad!'” Issacs continued, “We played a lot of games and watched a lot of movies. And so I felt like they were my kids. I kind of fell in love with them early on.”
That genuine paternal feeling made Timothy’s near-homicidal/suicidal spiral all the more harrowing for Isaacs to play. “He’s got a plan in his drug-addled state. I’m going to kill them. That’s the best thing to do out of love. All actors ever want is a secret. That’s all they ever want is a secret to play. So there’s what you’re doing, there’s what you think you’re doing, there’s what you intend to do, and then there’s something else.”
Isaacs became slightly emotional when diving into that secret, taking the audience into Tim’s head for the pivotal moment (spoiler alert) where his is one drink away from murdering his whole family but then abandons the horrifying action at the last second. “In that moment I pictured Patrick, Sam and Sarah Catherine as little kids, my little kids. And I just saw their little faces. And I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it… I looked at the adults and I saw their little faces in my head. And I just couldn’t do it.”
Parker Posey and Schwarzenegger’s mother-son shorthand kicked off on the first day Posey arrived. “I remember the first day that she landed. You walked into the restaurant, and I was sitting there, and you came up. I was going to say, ‘Oh, hey, Parker, good to see you.’ And you sat down and you go, ‘Now, how’s my son?’ And instantly, it was like creating that character dynamic between us,” Schwarzenegger shared.
Posey, always full of surprises, went straight into his character asking the actor about his plans for Saxon. “And then you said, ‘Now, tell me, what body part do you walk with?’ And I thought, you know what, Saxon walks with his dick. That’s what he does… And you were like, ‘That’s my boy!” The recollection received big laughs from those in attendance.
In addition, Posey also shared her thoughts about how she wanted to play Victoria and why White’s writing gave her so much to work with. “You could call her a narcissist. I love her absorption in her family. These positive choices of just love and absorption and not wanting her children to grow up and to leave her. I got to call on a lot of my southern drama roots and my family and I just ate it up,” she explained. “When I read it and I saw these zingers it was it made me so happy that you know it’s like the comedy is light and then you can go really dark. I think there’s a natural balance in humor and darkness and light. I knew she was like a queen in this way that she really wielded her power.”
The women’s trio of Coon, Bibb, and Michelle Monaghan (no present) found their own domestic rhythm. They were the first on set and essentially lived together for the length of the shoot. “Carrie and I would do our laundry in a bucket. We love laundry day,” Bibb said. “But I think those experiences start to feed into the work. You’re living together all the time. So there is the history that starts to form for six months,” Coon added. “It’s also just so smart to have such a relatable storyline. There are some really Greek things going on this season. Very Greek. It’s death and spirituality.”
Leslie Bibb reflected on the unique safety of working on Mike White’s set. “Mike will never drop you,” she said. “You just know that at the end of the day, we always went home knowing that we were safe because Mike had it. His writing is extraordinary, but him as a director, I feel like especially in this third season, he really stepped into a real confidence.” Carrie Coon nodded in agreement, “There’s nothing arbitrary about what he’s doing. Nothing.”
Trust powered Sam Rockwell’s buzz-creating monologue, one that took viewers on a twisting, unexpected journey into his character’s head on a path to enlightenment. The revelation required a good deal of workshopping and was only possible due to the work and real life, almost brotherly, relatiobship of Rockwell and Goggins. On set that day Goggins took on another role as set sheriff. “There was maybe a couple of walkie-talkies went off or something. You were like, ‘Hey, man, let’s have a little respect for the monologue. There’s an actor on set doing a monologue,’” Rockwell recalled laughing. Goggins added, “I think the last parting insult was, ‘You’ll never forget this day if you be quiet and let him do his job.’”
Goggins later reflected on watching Rockwell discover the piece take after take, “Every one of them could have been used. Every one of them would have said something different. He didn’t make it his job to have a goal. It was to experience what that was like for a person who had found spirituality and had put that demon behind him. It was just beautiful to watch him go through that process and to listen to that story as if it was happening the first time every single time.”
Walton Goggins was equally effusive about working opposite Aimee Lou Wood, the much talked about and tragic screen duo. “She’s just open and ethereal and so present and honest. We knew what was going to happen from the outset. We read those scripts that were written before we began filming them. We talked at length about what is it that we want to say about this, about the two sides of this coin; One person who is free and the other is in an arrested state of development and not realizing what he has right in front of him the whole time. And how do you fall in love so that the audience would fall in love with both of them?”
Tayme Thapthimthong, in his breakout role as security guard Gai-Tok, built the character from real observation. “I really started to take a lot more notice on the Thai security guards in these hotels, how they act. The reason why I decided to play him so, just make him more lovable and approachable.” The choice paid off, “The feedback after from Thai people coming up to me and saying, thank you for representing us like that. We’re very, very proud.”
Carrie Coon’s finale monologue became a master class in Mike White’s refusal to settle. “He did not let go of me,” Coon said. “A lot of directors would be like, hey, that was pretty good. You’re Carrie Coon. But he was like, there’s just something else. So he was just really dogged about it.”
As the night drew to a close, the affection in the room for their work and each other was obvious. These actors didn’t just play “families”, they lived as one for half a year, ate meals together, did bucket laundry together, and then had to perform together. Under Mike White’s fatherly eye they pulled it off. .Jason Isaacs summed it up best: “Once in a blue moon you get a script like that and you go, if we don’t fuck this up, everyone’s going to think we’re something special. And this is something special.”
On the evidence of Season 3, they most certainly did not fuck it up.
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