Inside The White Lotus behind-the-scenes arguments: ‘I didn’t have many allies’

The White Lotus season three has brought us plenty of drama on and off-screen, with stars revealing tensions were brewing backstage.

Mike White’s black comedy has returned for a third instalment, this time filmed in Thailand, starring Aimee Lou Wood, Jason Isaacs, Walton Goggins, Parker Posey and Patrick Schwarzenegger.

Discourse around The White Lotus has been focused on nude scenes and viewers being horrified over a disturbing incest storyline, even threatening to boycott.

Nonetheless, the series has managed to score an impressive 89% Rotten Tomatoes rating, with HBO saying each episode has hit a viewing high.

The eight-part drama follows the dynamics of a new group of elite holidaymakers with their own sets of issues – friends reuniting after life pulled them apart, age-gap couples keeping secrets, and one wealthy patriarch failing to escape financial problems at home, while his wife battles with her daughter wanting to move to a monastery in Thailand, and their sons become involved in a ‘sickening’ incest plot.

Of course, in true White Lotus style, there’ll be a murder too.

And behind the scenes, stars have revealed things were just as dramatic, with Harry Potter legend Jason joking: ‘There’s an off-screen White Lotus as much as there’s an on-screen White Lotus, just with hopefully fewer body bags.’

‘Alliances were formed and broken’

Filming for The White Lotus took place over many months, with the cast jetting out to The Four Seasons Koh Samui where they stayed over that period.

But it certainly wasn’t as luxurious as it sounds, with Jason revealing they were all ‘on top of each other’, saying: ‘Nobody should be that jealous of me, it wasn’t a holiday.’

He continued: ’40 men and women, crammed into a villa with the air conditioning off. It’s over 100 degrees (45℃).

‘We’re all covered in makeup and there’s lights and you’re there all day. It’s quite gamey is what I’m saying.’

He added that they were ‘in each others’ pockets’ for seven months, jokingly adding: ‘Most people got on with each other, most of the time.

‘But there were alliances formed and broken.

‘There’s an off-screen White Lotus as much as there’s an on-screen White Lotus, just with hopefully fewer body bags.’

‘Friendships were lost’

In another interview, the Lucius Malfoy actor compared filming The White Lotus to Lord of the Flies ‘in a gilded cage’.

‘It was like a cross between summer camp and Lord of the Flies but in a gilded cage,’ he said.

‘It wasn’t a holiday. Some people got very close, there were friendships that were made and friendships that were lost,’ he told Vulture.

‘All the things you would imagine with a group of people unanchored from their home lives on the other side of the world, in the intense pressure cooker of the working environment with eye-melting heat and insects and late nights.

‘They say in the show, “What happens in Thailand stays in Thailand,” but there’s an off-screen White Lotus as well, with fewer deaths but just as much drama.’

He refrained from sharing the drama, laughing when asked if he would: ‘Absolutely not. I became very close to some people and less close to others, but we still all had that experience together and there’s a certain level of discretion required.’

‘It was like an open prison camp’

And in a third interview, Jason compared filming to ‘an open prison camp’.

After Carrie Coon said she’d be ‘processing [filming] for a long time’, he told The Guardian: ‘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.’

He went on: ‘I can’t pretend I wasn’t involved in some off-screen drama. [producer David Bernad] 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.’

He claimed he was ‘used to it’ but his wife, who was with him in Thailand while the cast were filming, thought ‘some of these people are f**king mad’.

‘No, it’s just a bunch of actors away on location, love. You’ve forgotten what it’s like,’ Jason replied.

‘People were annoyed with one another’

Producer Dave also told the publication that after members of the cast ‘subconsciously or consciously’ took on the personas of their characters, some started to get annoyed with others.

He said: ‘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.’

Being in charge of ‘HR’, he added he had to deal with ‘usually stupid things, little grievances’.

‘It was like a social experiment’

Sex Education actress Aimee admitted filming became ‘like a social experiment’.

‘I don’t know whether I would describe it as fun,’ she told The Guardian, recalling ‘fun moments’.

‘I was amazed by what was happening. How am I in Thailand? Living in a hotel, that we also film in? It was like a social experiment.’

She added: ‘I will never have an experience like that again. It was so extreme. So the fun bits were unbelievable, so special.

‘The ocean, the landscape, it was majestic. Mike is a genius. Everyone involved is amazing, it’s just the circumstances are quite extreme.’

‘Everyone becomes their character to an extent, but I didn’t even know who I was,’ the Toxic Town actress also said.

‘I was crying a lot in the first week’

The stress of filming the series took a toll on some of the stars, with Chloe actress Charlotte Le Bon admitting she was ‘crying a lot that first week’, while Walton revealed he felt ‘misunderstood’ and feared he was being a ‘downer’.

He told The Hollywood Reporter: ‘I was just consumed by the story. It got to a place where they would just put my chair somewhere different on set or I’d sit on a rock away from everybody and wait for the weekends to hang out with people.

‘But Aimee and I became very close, very quickly, and a part of that was because when everyone else was like, “Oh, just leave that guy alone,” Aimee constantly came and poked me.’

Producers were ‘anxious’ over actors dropping out

The incest storyline wasn’t only disturbing for viewers, but also for some actors who weren’t prepared to sign up to the show for that reason.

Casting director Meredith Tucker told The Hollywood Reporter that more auditions were needed to find the Ratliff children, and producers were anxious that the two stars who they had chosen would ultimately drop out after reading the script.

She said: ‘For that stuff with the brothers, we had to tell people beforehand. We said, “There is going to be some same-sex kissing and stuff. Are you comfortable with that?”

‘I think maybe one kid for Sam’s role dropped out, but some of these kids were barely 18, so I could understand.’

Producer Dave added: ‘When we sent the scripts to Patrick and Sam [Nivola], Mike and I were both like, “I hope they don’t drop out.” Mike made me text Patrick. We were anxious.’

‘I didn’t have that many allies in there’

It was recently revealed that The White Lotus’ composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer quit due to creative differences.

He claimed conversations with producers could be ‘hysterical’, and that the creative team repeatedly requested music that was less experimental than what he wanted to produce.

Recalling differences over the infamous theme tune from season one, he claimed Mike wanted ‘something you would listen to in Ibiza, in some clubby place with a chill, sexy vibe’.

‘I just stuck to what I was doing,’ he told The New York Times.

‘And when I was giving versions, it was still the same thing: There were still crazy people and screaming and stuff like that. From there, it became this weird relationship of, How do I pass all this weird music into the show?’

He added to the publication: ‘There was a French movie, La Cage Aux Folles. You know how there’s Albin, which is like the star, and there’s Renato, who is the producer who is always taking care that Albin doesn’t lose his mind about something, because Albin is the diva and Renato is the guy who is trying to make everything work. To me, the show felt very much like that.’

He went on to share a conversation that happened after backlash from viewers over the change of theme tune for the third season.

He said: ‘People are furious about the change of the theme, and I thought that was interesting.

‘I texted the producer and I told him that it would be great to, at some point, give them the longer version with the ooh-loo-loo-loos, because people will explode if they realize that it was going there anyway. He thought it was a good idea. But then Mike cut that — he wasn’t happy about that.

‘I mean, at that point, we already had our last fight forever, I think. So he was just saying no to anything. So I just uploaded that to my YouTube.’

Speaking of the ‘tension’ and being ‘so stressed out’ after complaints over the music, and saying that he didn’t feel like he had ‘that many allies in there’, Cristobal added: ‘I was watching the Emmys, and it’s like, there’s one thing I’m pretty proud of and that is I feel like I never gave up.

‘Maybe I was being unprofessional, and for sure Mike feels that I was always unprofessional to him because I didn’t give him what he wanted. But what I gave him did this, you know — did those Emmys, people going crazy.’

The White Lotus is available to watch on Sky Atlantic and NOW.

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