The White Lotus is back with more sun, sea, sex and secrets of the super-rich: with a side order of slaying. By season three, we know the drill. Showrunner Mike White’s excoriating take on how the other half live – and the slowly unfolding mystery around who has killed one of them at a fancy holiday destination – is now one of the most eagerly awaited returning series.
As we near the end of a long winter, the prospect of a new group of elites checking in to The White Lotus – this time in Thailand – and gradually revealing the misery behind their megabucks is especially enticing.
So, Jason Isaacs, what was it about filming for months at a five-star resort in Thailand that made you want to take on the role of tycoon Timothy Ratliff?
“Actually, my wife came with me for the first time because we were fresh empty nesters,” he grins. “So what was it about staying in the five-star hotel in Thailand that made her want to come to my job for the first time? That’s the real question.”
It wasn’t just location, location, location, though. Isaacs, whose career has taken him from The Patriot and Black Hawk Down to Harry Potter’s dastardly Lucius Malfoy via The Death of Stalin and Cary Grant bio-series Archie, knows a decent script when he sees one.
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“It was Mike White. I’ve seen, I suspect, every single word he’s ever written for the screen. As an actor, if you’re smart, you gravitate towards the best material because it makes you look good. In my career, stretching back over the millions of decades, the few times I’ve been singled out for praise it was always the good writing. Mike paints human beings in ways that are totally gripping and entertaining and amusing and shocking. My family were addicted to it.
“I admire his old-fashioned storytelling. He lays out his stall slowly, methodically, then the layers come off people and this social satire reveals itself. Everything that’s universal or horrifying about our behaviour is revealed. He’s an excavator of the human condition with an almost demonic sense of humour.”
Even so, Isaacs is eager to dampen some of the hype around the show.
“But it’s just a bunch of rich people in a hotel. The expectation around the world is so overwhelming. When you’re doing it, it is just another job,” he says. “Then, six months later, every single person I meet, and the entire internet – certainly the bit the algorithms steer towards me – is treating it like Jesus and The Beatles are bringing an album out. But it’s just a television show.”
Isaacs joins Carrie Coon, Walton Goggins, Aimee Lou Wood in the latest series. He plays “a fat cat patriarch of a southern family from Durham, North Carolina”. If his accent is quite something, Parker Posey’s – she plays his wife, Victoria – is off the scale.
The White Lotus’ new family The Ratliffs, from left: Jason Isaacs (Timothy), Parker Posey (Victoria), Patrick Schwarzenegger (Saxon), Sarah Catherine Hook (Piper) and Sam Nivola (Lochlan). Image: HBO
“It’s BIG acting, that’s for sure,” says Isaacs. “Sometimes you get jobs where you’re being natural and playing someone in situations you can identify with, and it’s NAR – no acting required. With this, lots of acting was required. And Parker brought some game! There’s something fabulous about chewing up all those vowels.”
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Watching Ratliff’s downfall and his family implode looks set to be one of the highlights of the series.
“It becomes very drastic, very quickly,” he says. “Things turn to shit and Tim Ratliff has the worst holiday of his lifetime. So I have to go through every single emotion under the sun, which is what actors like to do.”
We do love watching the 1% get their comeuppance, don’t we?
“Absolutely. I love it too. We watch these people who look like they’ve got everything and console ourselves with the fact that they’re miserable as hell.”
Isaacs even talks us through the abject misery of filming.
“Mostly we’re in our little story silos. So if there are six storylines, five-sixths of the time you’re not working,” he says.
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“This is monstrous to read – and I apologise to anybody who is currently vomiting on the pages of Big Issue as I say this – but you can only have so many massages and go on so many snorkelling trips. It did turn into a gilded cage version of Groundhog Day after a while.
“I try not to just be in the world of the film – I want to connect with local things. And I’m a tennis player. So I pack my toothbrush, then my racket, then my underwear in that order and I’ll find a tennis club and talk to people.
“I like to see what it’s like to live in other places. I’ve been lucky to film for long periods of time in Cuba, Australia, Croatia and Poland before this. If I can get the local crew to take me out, to sample what it’s like to be in different cultures, I always do.
“So my wife and I travelled around. Thailand was fascinating and incredibly contradictory. We’re living inside this bubble of insane, absurd, surreal luxury, but outside it has some grotesque things – the sex industry and the predators who arrive there, some heartbreaking levels of poverty – plus some very beautiful things, very spiritual things. All life is there.
“And when the kids came out, we went to Cambodia – another fascinating country. It’s got lots of beauty, but my god, it’s still got an open wound from the genocide. So it was challenging and interesting to go there.”
Best of all, though, for Isaacs, was Bhutan: “It is literally the happiest country on earth,” he grins. “They have a Ministry of Happiness and a Gross National Happiness index. Anything they do in the country is filtered through that prism. That is one of the things I’ll take away from this job – nobody does it like the Bhutanese.”
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The White Lotus is on Sky / Now TV from 16 February.
