Paradise hotel
Check-in is open… but who will survive the latest series of The White Lotus?
HBO
- Huw Fullerton
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in February 2025.
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If you were to look up the White Lotus hotel chain online, the TripAdvisor ratings would tell quite a story. Because below the top reviews paying tribute to the luxurious facilities, attentive staff and stunning locations, as you scrolled down to the one-star ratings, you’d surely have reason to pause. Sexual scandals, rude guests, erratic behaviour from hotel employees and several deaths in multiple locations of the high-end resort… Perhaps that Travelodge in Torquay wouldn’t be so bad after all?
Still, what might make for a stressful mini-break makes for intoxicating television. Over two series – with a third now about to begin – creator Mike White’s The White Lotus has taken audiences, critics and awards bodies by storm. Though describing exactly what it is, even this far in, remains a bit of a challenge. “I’m not sure that any label fits The White Lotus,” says actor Jason Isaacs, who joins for series three. “This is a comedy, a thriller, an erotic, existential mystery – it’s a Venn diagram where every single genre meets in the middle.”
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Creator Mike White wrote The White Lotus as a one-off drama about the rich guests and staff at an ultra-fancy resort in Hawaii, where money, power and sexual rivalry bubbled over into tragedy. Filmed as a six-part series in the middle of Covid in an empty hotel in Maui over about four months, American actor Natasha Rothwell, who played kind-hearted spa manager Belinda, looks fondly back on those days. “We slept where we were shooting and we all ate together,” she says. “It was like a creative arts camp. We were travelling in this caravan of creators from location to location. It facilitated a closeness, unlike any other production I’ve been on.”
And yet, come series two, White decided to check into a new White Lotus hotel, in a different part of the world (this time, Sicily) and a different collection of guests. Well, with one exception – series one star Jennifer Coolidge returned as self-absorbed but wealthy guest Tanya, alongside an all-new cast that included Theo James, Tom Hollander, Leo Woodall and Will Sharpe – a surfeit of Brits.
Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Wood star in the new series of The White Lotus. HBO
It was during series two, Rothwell recalls now, that fan interest reached “fever pitch”. And as she watched the audience and anticipation for each episode grow, she kept a big secret – that White planned to bring her character back for series three.
“Mike had messaged me while he was still shooting season two,” she reveals. “We went for dinner and he said, ‘I’m working on season two, but I’m already noodling about what season three might be – and I’m thinking that Belinda might come back.”
The last time we saw her, Belinda’s dreams of opening her own spa were dashed by the selfishness of Coolidge’s Tanya. Now, as series three begins, she has moved on, and embarks on an exchange programme with the White Lotus resort in Thailand.
“There’s a lot that Belinda’s gone through in terms of being vulnerable and sharing her hopes and dreams with a complete stranger – and having them dashed. It could make anyone gun-shy,” Rothwell says. “And I think she’s been in a bit of a depression, a funk. She’s been on a bit of a healing journey, and is now trying to shake off the last remnants of that.”
Natasha Rothwell and Jennifer Coolidge in the first series of The White Lotus. HBO
She’s not the only one searching for something at the resort. As we’ve now come to expect, there’s an all-star cast of guests checking into the White Lotus for series three, including Carrie Coon, Michelle Monaghan and Leslie Bibb as three friends on a girls’ trip, Jason Isaacs as a high-powered Southern businessman who hides money problems from his family, and Walton Goggins as a grumpy loner with an optimistic young girlfriend (Aimee Lou Wood) in tow. Based on past experience, however, at least one of these guests will be flying home in a coffin.
“Mike [White] creates these fantastically complicated characters, really human, really layered and nuanced,” Isaacs says. “And as the episodes go on, they become richer and more nuanced, more complicated, more recognisable.”
Along with the new cast, there’s also a stunning new location in Thailand, with the production descending on Bangkok, Phuket, and Ko Samui for nearly six months last year. “You’d be sitting on the beach and forget for a second, then you’d turn around and see the lights and be reminded you’re on a set,” recalls Aimee Lou Wood, who plays bubbly Brit Chelsea. “It was the most immersive experience I’ve ever had. There were so many lizards, geckos going around my bedroom all the time. I would be having a coffee, and the next minute, there’s a huge monitor lizard falling asleep at my feet.
Dom Hetrakul and Natasha Rothwell in The White Lotus season 3. HBO
“Leo [Woodall] from season two was sending me messages. He was fully aware of what it’s like – incredible, but overwhelming and claustrophobic, because you become like a White Lotus guest. You walk home after work but there isn’t anywhere to go, no separation.”
“Mike saw lots of people going to Thailand to explore that notion of self and who we are and why we are,” explains Isaacs. “So, quite a few of the storylines in this series involve that – especially my character Timothy’s. He is challenged to work out who he wants to be and why – and what would he be without all this stuff.”
There might be a little more darkness this season
Natasha Rothwell
Beyond these vague little hints, the cast are remaining tight-lipped about what they filmed in Thailand over those six months, or what to expect from the series as a whole. All Rothwell will say is “expect the unexpected. I think that there might be a little bit more darkness this season than people are used to, based on previous seasons,” she muses. Considering both previous series opened with dead bodies and included drugs, deception, infidelity, robbery and criminal conspiracy, the mind boggles.
“I’ve seen the first season described as being about power and money, the second about sex and this is about social identity,” says Isaacs. “But those elements are in all of them.”
Above all, however, The White Lotus explores the tension between guests and staff, with wealth divides and class prejudices as powerful a driver for drama as murder, sex or revenge. “I mean, it’s in the DNA of travel,” agrees Rothwell. “When you buy a ticket on a plane, what class are you travelling? Where do you sit? Are you upstairs or are you downstairs?”
It’s no spoiler to say that in this series, as with the other two, The White Lotus’s sympathies lie, for the most part, with the local workers over the wealthy tourists – and Rothwell says that this has been the show’s lasting legacy for her.
“Travel, for me, has changed for ever,” she says. “Every hotel I go into, staff will come up to me and are like, ‘Belinda! Thanks for showing me. I feel seen.’ It’s been a joy to play a character who’s been rooted for so much. It’s a dream.”
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Though, hopefully, those staff don’t identify too closely with the world of The White Lotus? “No,” she laughs. “No one has died on any of my holidays – thank God!”
Authors
Huw FullertonCommissioning editor
Huw Fullerton is a commissioning editor for Radio Times magazine handling comedy, entertainment and specialist drama. In a previous regeneration, he covered all things sci-fi and fantasy for RadioTimes.com.
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