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Imagine a hospital room: in the bed is a cheerful man, white hair in aTintin quiff. His eyes are Swedish blue, his lashes a fine blond fan. He has a nebuliser strapped to his face, he’s taking deep breaths so that the steroid can loosen the bronchitis that has seized his chest. Outside is the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai and beyond, hills of tropical rainforest. But our patient is focused inward, mind ablaze. He is watching scenes unfold – a hotel, flame-lit, characters in frenzied dialogue. There are monks, mafia. Somewhere, echoing gunshots, causing his limbs to twitch. Over the next two nights the entire season of The White Lotus 3 rolls before him, “as a fever dream”. The patient is Mike White, creator, writer and director of the HBO blockbuster. “By morning, I’m like, I just came up with the storyline! It was wild. I felt like I’d done crack.”
White – wiry, smiley, with a voice that vibrates emotion – immediately got on to his producer, David Bernad. Bernad has worked with White for nearly 20 years and is a solid, unflustered man, the perfect foil for White’s creative mania. As White relayed how he’d hallucinated the new season’s plot, and the stories had come cosmically through the magic of Thai spirits, Bernad thought “interesting” and turned his mind to casting, locations and crew. “Mike is a very singular film-maker,” he says.
For those unfamiliar, The White Lotus is a prickly satire, set in a luxury resort, with a superb ensemble cast – most memorably Jennifer Coolidge as Tanya, a pampered alcoholic, forever on the brink. Commissioned as a one-off in lockdown, the surprise hit pulled in 10 million viewers per episode, eclipsing Succession and winning a sweep of Emmys and Golden Globes. There’s a framing device: each season opens with a body, then rewinds so the action can slow-boil over seven days, but the content, as White puts it, “shape shifts”. The first season, set in Hawaii, focused on wealth privilege (who can forget Olivia and Paula with their Freud and Fanon, and looks like well-aimed grenades). The second, in Sicily, was a bedroom farce (with a sensational side order of “high-end gays”).
This time, White, 54, draws on his obsession with spirituality, west versus east, “kind of a heaven and hell”, Bernad says. The first seasons cost an estimated $3m an episode, but three is a monster: eight episodes and a sprawling cast including Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), the “I’m-done-with-rich-white-people” spa manager from season one. The new hotel guests are three midlife blondes (Carrie Coon, Michelle Monaghan and Leslie Bibb), an upstanding southern family (Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sarah Catherine Hook and Sam Nivola) and a raddled misery guts with his young, Mancunian “let’s get fucked up” girlfriend (Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Wood). Probably most famous in the lineup is Lisa of K-pop band Blackpink (real name Lalisa Manobal), making her acting debut in the Thai cast, alongside London-born Tayme Thapthimthong, who trained with the military before moving to Thailand as a singer and bodyguard.
To say the show is hotly anticipated is to understate the frenzy around the franchise. Where else could you see a story about families on holiday so perfectly crescendo into a ketamine-fuelled gay orgy? When the latest trailer dropped, however, fans had questions. Why does it look like an action thriller? Where is the subtlety, the knowingness, the gleeful digs at the very class in whose point of view the show is framed?
Mostly, though, they are still in mourning for Jennifer Coolidge, whose character was killed off in the season two finale. Mike White, too. “I miss her a lot,” he says. “Not just as an actress, but as a person on the set. She was such an emotional part of the show.” So Mike White bottled lightning twice. The question is: can he do it again?
All of which brings me to Thailand, midway through filming. This season’s White Lotus is the Four Seasons in Koh Samui, but it’s the first day of shooting at the Rosewood in Phuket, where the restaurant scenes take place. It’s hot – so hot that on a boat the previous day, one crew member’s Crocs melted into the floor.
In the press tent, a handful of writers are watching a monitor while we wait for the cast to be brought over. Bernad raises his voice over the cicadas so he can explain to us the scene being shot. Isaacs, Posey and Hook, of the family from North Carolina, are having dinner. Their two sons (played by Schwarzenegger and Nivola) are elsewhere “on an adventure”. There’s a conversation about Buddhism –“boo-dism” in Posey’s character’s southern drawl – but it’s clear from Isaacs’s face that something is very awry. Across the table Posey, in an off-the-shoulder orange blouse, seems oblivious, consulting a menu and ordering wine. Her husband, she says, wants something not too spicy. “It’s his I-B-S.”
Then Posey stumbles in her pronunciation of a Thai dish and there’s a shout: “Cut!” Posey fans herself furiously. “I am burning up,” she says, looking around. An ice pack is passed. She puts it in her armpit and asks someone to scratch her back. We watch White scuttle over to the table. “Awesome!” he’s saying; they’re all doing great. As he’s returning to his directing area, he pauses, turns. “What do you think?” he says, one finger raised to his lips. “Is there a world where maybe … ?” We can’t hear his next instruction, but he’s animated, his expressions elastic. In the tent, Bernad is saying Posey’s character thinks she’s better than everyone else.
We watch the scene go again, and then what feels like 23 times, White sometimes squawking with laughter from behind his monitor. “Mike will not move on until he’s happy,” Rothwell explains when she visits to chat about the show. “That’s what I find myself saying to each of the actors. Because everyone wants to show up and do the job and not fail Mike. And I’m like, ‘Listen: he will not move on until he’s happy. You can take that to the bank.’ And you see everyone’s shoulders go down, like, OK.”
The actors have signed NDAs, so instead of plot, we hear about life on set, the outbreaks of dengue and food poisoning. There are monitor lizards as big as crocodiles in one hotel; snakes, monkeys, tarantulas. There are frogs the size of your thumb, which interrupt takes with a sound “like Pavarotti”. Many seem relieved with a change of scene in Phuket – they’ve been months in Koh Samui, which can get “claustrophobic.”
Indeed, for the entire seven-month duration of filming, actors do not live in rented accommodation, as they might on other films. They live on set. That’s right, they live in the White Lotus hotel, with one other, cut off from their worlds, in the searing heat. Isaacs says, “It’s a kind of crucible, a five-star gilded cage. There’s no question that sometimes it is absolutely fabulous, and sometimes it’s Lord of the Flies.”
Although The White Lotus is filmed in relative luxury, with housekeepers and personal butlers and an open bar, actors are expected to pick up incidentals. Goggins told Stephen Colbert he was shocked to discover a bottle of prosecco cost $150. “Six weeks into filming, I go to pay my bill. You’re telling me Thai-spiced cashews cost that much? I thought I had maybe, like, five. And they said, ‘No, you had 30.’”
Bernad calls it an “adult summer camp” and says he’s never been on a set like it: “Everyone there is just part of the production, but there’s kids and spouses running around, too.” Arnas Fedaravičius, who plays the hot Russian yogi assigned to the three midlife women, says there’s “a weird, disconnected feeling. I’m here for work but it’s a very vacation atmosphere.”
Some days, the heat makes work difficult. They can’t use air conditioning because of the noise while shooting. On film, they have to look as if they’re having a good time on holiday, when in truth they can barely function.
But it’s not all work. There’s swimming, boats, boxing school. They can learn Thai – or Italian, Bernad says, as many crew came with them from Sicily. “Some people’s project is their body,” Isaacs says, “building a 10-pack or losing half their weight. Others work on spiritual things; meditating, looking deep inside. I’m a tennis player, so rather shallowly I spend whenever I can on a court.” And in the evening? “People are away from home and, you know, there’s a lot of bacchanalian behaviour going on. I’m not telling stories out of school. It’s just grownups doing whatever we like. Thailand is a place full of parties, and we are not immune.”
Of things most often said about Mike White, the first must be that he’s “obsessed” with reality TV. “He’s very inspired by it,” Bernad says. So much so that he’s been a contestant on Survivor – and not a wafty celebrity version, but the hard-nosed real show. He proved a wily tactician and won second place. Parallels with The White Lotus are not hard to see: the conceit is premised on characters thrown together in a closed-off world with the heat turned to boil.
The second is that he runs an unusual set. So, unlike most big-budget US TV shows, there is no writers’ room, just White. Every sparking word comes from his own brain. Also: all cast, no matter how famous, must audition. Isaacs, who played Draco Malfoy’s dad in Harry Potter (and whom Bernad suggested to White, having watched Death of Stalin on a plane), was surprised. “I went, ‘Tape? With Mike?’ And they go, ‘No, with a casting director.’ ‘Really? OK.’ I don’t want to get too big for my boots, but I walked through Times Square and my face was on like five different billboards.’” But Isaacs did it, as he’d done aged 25, straight out of drama school, and admits, “I was incredibly nervous.”
The third thing said about Mike White? To a man, they call him a genius.
At sundown, White comes to the press tent and sits on a plastic stool. He says Thailand was a good canvas to get into the “conflict” people have when they seek “some kind of spiritual experience but get caught up in baser impulses”. This is especially true of Bangkok, he says: “An everything-goes kind of city.”
He wasn’t sure until his hospital bed epiphany what the show would be about, but he knew Buddhism would feature. He had a “little Buddhist self-help phase” in 2004, after he suffered a breakdown while making a show for Fox – coincidentally called Cracking Up. “I got really into the concepts,” he says, forehead shining in the heat. “So I just thought maybe that would be something that was rich. But I didn’t know what the characters were, how to organise the ideas. I was just sort of hoping I would find inspiration.”
For the first season, HBO approached White because they knew he was a fast writer. “It was, like, gun to my head, ‘Come up with something’ and I was so bored during the pandemic, I thought, ‘I’ll do anything.’ I don’t usually do this, but I just started writing … I was like, ‘I have three weeks to write these scripts.’”
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Does that make season three the most personal? He thinks about this for a second. “There are some elements that are very personal, and there are some parts that I’m just like, ‘Wow, who wrote this?’ So, yeah, who knows where shit comes from.”
While his work is not autobiographical, he certainly draws on experience. After his breakdown, he wrote and directed Enlightened, starring Laura Dern, about a sales executive who unravels after an affair and has an epiphany while swimming with turtles in Hawaii.
When White was 11, his father, a minister at the Covenant church, in Pasadena, California, came out to the family but stayed closeted to the outside world for another decade. “I guess it made me very skeptical about how people present themselves,” he told the New York Times. “What’s really the truth. But in a way, it was also really liberating, especially for me to be given the idea that there is no way to live this normative lifestyle.” He went to an east coast university, but returned to LA and secured a job as a writer on Dawson’s Creek. He appeared on the reality TV show Amazing Race twice (with his dad). He wrote The Good Girl, starring Jennifer Aniston, and School of Rock for his friend Jack Black. Later, on the advice of Shirley MacLaine, he consulted a past-life regression guide and afterwards commissioned portraits of his 14 past lives. One was a medieval soldier who died in battle, another a Maori tribesman. Another still was a Gatsby-era alcoholic whose boat sank, and there was a Cuban waitress who he said “slept with all my friends’ boyfriends and I got an STD and no one would help me and I died in a flophouse”.
White has said he identified with Armond (Murray Bartlett), the put-upon hotel manager in the first season of The White Lotus, and with Quentin (Tom Hollander), the English expat queen in season two. He also relates to Quinn Mossbacher, the 16-year-old boy who jettisons a life of screens and privilege to run away with a Hawaiian canoe crew (“Maybe it’s my Survivor experiences”).
But in his life, White has also been – like all of us, he believes – the terrible man-brat Shane Patton (Jack Lacy), who even on honeymoon is obsessing that he’s been given an inferior room. That people can see themselves in all his characters is part of the show’s success. And while he doesn’t retread storylines, he often returns to the symptoms of our modern malaise – screen addiction, porn, prescription meds, identity narcissism: humans in crisis, the crisis it is to be human.
Asked what else makes the show loved, White shrugs. “Honestly, I have no idea. I’ve done so many other things where I’m like, ‘This is cool’ and nobody watches. I feel like a surfer. I’ve been in the water a long time and I caught a wave. I am still riding that wave. So it’s nice.”
White doesn’t shy away from the seamier side of Thai tourism. Some of this season’s action unfolds on a superyacht whose crew were thrilled to be rented by the White Lotus team, “because they were so used to Russians with prostitutes and guns”. Isaacs says, “To be honest, what I saw with the older European men and the young Thai girls is disgusting and turns your stomach. The scale of the prostitution and that people are sold into it is horrendous.” White says he noticed all the Russians as he travelled around Thailand, so wrote them in: “Hopefully they don’t feel like stock parts.”
Isaacs says White never stops thinking about the show. Even on set he’s writing all the time. “He’ll text at odd hours, always wanting to work on it, always wanting to make it better.” White says he wants actors to feel they can approach him with their thoughts, that there are no hierarchies on set: “I don’t want to be somebody who’s niggly about every word.” He wants the characters to feel “lived in” by the actors, “natural”. But adds, “Every once in a while, I’ll think, no, I want them to say it how I wrote it. Some words are important.”
All this freedom is because he doesn’t like sets that are “uptight”. “I try to make it fun as best as I can. But if you want to get something, you want to have an intentional approach. So it’s figuring out when to be mellow and when to care.”
White apparently sees no contradiction in being “mellow” and also one of the most competitive people anyone has ever met. He’s training as if for a triathlon, arriving in the gym at 4.30am and where possible going to bed at 8pm. On set he has instigated a Whoop competition – as in the wristband that monitors sleep and exertion – encouraging those in the Whoop group to compare daily stats. Not just Bernad, whose Whoop registered an extreme workout, so terrified was he on the speedboat yesterday, but the young, muscle-bound actors such as Schwarzenegger.
“Mike is always asking me how many grams of protein I’ve had today,” Schwarzenegger, 31, says when he pops by the tent in an I Heart LA cap. “And what’s my heart rate variability, and how many hours of sleep did I get. He’s like the only other person who, if I have a 6am call time and I go to the gym at 4.45 or 5, he’s already there.” Fedaravičius, 33, is also in the gym. In addition to practising muay thai and yoga, “I lift a lot of weights,” he says. Also, “I eat only once a day.” Usually that’s breakfast at 7am, because the hotel puts on such a good spread, but sometimes a steak or three burgers at supper. He says White’s most useful note has been “just relax”: “What Mike is asking is for us to bring in more of ourselves; uniquely ourselves. Which as an artist and an actor is a one-of-a-kind experience.”
Most of the actors here agree that if White gives you a note, you’d be a damn fool not to take it. That’s not to say everyone does. There’s a huge clash of acting styles on set. Some are method actors, staying in character between takes and even for days between scenes. Others shake it off when the director says cut. When Isaacs, who is British, comes out of his scene with Posey, he’s asked how they differ. “She has a completely different attitude to how to be on a set and how to bring a script to life. She’s a very idiosyncratic individual. And we’re from very different schools of acting.”
In Sicily, reports that Aubrey Plaza (Harper) and Michael Imperioli (Dominic) disagreed on improvisation were batted away. Plaza joked Imperioli has “intense method energy” but said they had a collaborative relationship on set. It was also suggested that in Hawaii, the onscreen friction between Bartlett and Lacy spilled on to set, something both actors denied.
After season three has wrapped, I ask Bernad, back in Los Angeles, to reflect on this aspect of the show. He says, “Whether it’s subconscious or conscious, people take on the persona of their character. Like any workplace, if you spend that much time together, people start to get annoyed with one other. The heat starts to get turned up, on and off set, just naturally [because of the storylines]. That’s another aspect of the show that’s unique. On normal productions, you work, then you go home to your family. Here you work, and you go home to the same people.” Who’s in charge of HR, so to speak? “I mean me, unfortunately, yeah. It’s usually stupid things, little grievances that I have to manage.”
Carrie Coon told one magazine of her six months in Thailand, “It’s something I’ll be processing for a long time.” Isaacs says, “It was a theatre camp, but to some extent an open prison camp: you couldn’t avoid one other. There are tensions and difficulties, I don’t know if they spilled from on screen to off-screen, or if it would have happened anyway. There were alliances that formed and broke, romances that formed and broke, friendships that formed and broke. It’s a long period of time for people to be away from their family with an open bar and all the wildness being in Thailand allows.
“I can’t pretend I wasn’t involved in some off-screen drama. Dave has seen it before, twice, and so has Mike. I can’t speak for them, but I imagine they think it feeds into the on-screen drama, and they might well be right. I think the heat contributed to these fissures appearing. We’ll all see one other again [for the premiere] and I’m sure we’ll be hugging and kissing and remembering it fondly. But there were times when things were not quite so fond. I was in some ways used to it, but within a couple of weeks my wife [who was with him on set and used to be an actor] went, ‘Some of these people are fucking mad.’ I said, ‘No, it’s just a bunch of actors away on location, love. You’ve forgotten what it’s like.’”
Still, Isaacs says he would follow Mike White off a cliff. Bernad, too. “I’ll go anywhere for Mike. I feel like everyone who works for him feels the same way.”
Maybe it could be somewhere not so hot? Bernad shakes his head. “Mike doesn’t like the cold.”
The White Lotus season three is on HBO from 16 February.
