The White Lotus

In an interview with NPR's Fresh Air last week, the writer and director Mike White suggested that his hit HBO series The White Lotus had less in common with ...

The impulse to follow in the footsteps of high-status people, emulating their experiences and then, by sharing, being emulated in turn? Week by week, The White Lotus achieved what only HBO series, [Taylor Swift ](https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/10/taylor-swift-midnights-album-review/671811/) [album drops](https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/10/taylor-swift-midnights-album-review/671811/), and Florence Pugh’s Instagram seem to be able to manage these days: taking over the discourse and leaving very few unsatisfied. (Even Mia and Lucia walked down a busy shopping street arm in arm, jubilant in floral dresses, waving at the notably nonviolent Alessio, just as they had in the first episode.) Meanwhile, Jack, the muscle-bound Essex boy charged with distracting (and possibly doing away with) Portia while Tanya was being dealt with, dropped her on an empty street by the airport instead, his COCK baseball cap seeming to linger unnervingly in one’s memory like the Cheshire Cat’s smile. [Season 2](https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/10/white-lotus-season-2-review/671938/), including the questions of why Lucia and Mia, the sex worker and the wannabe pianist, seemed physically stuck at the hotel, sleeping on sun loungers instead of going home; why every guest at the White Lotus went to Sicily—Sicily!—only to eat all their meals in the same anemic on-site restaurant; and what happened to Tanya in the finale. Season 2 of The White Lotus, in particular, felt like an aggregation of different source materials, many as fascinatingly cerebral as they were delightfully familiar.

Will Sharpe, who plays Ethan, sat down with Variety to reflect on the season.

I’ve written a film script, which is a love story set against a period of American history that I think is slightly underexplored and that I wanted to write about for a while. I think he realizes that he wants to fight for the marriage, and that he has to fight for the marriage. I think there is a sort of innate competitiveness in Ethan, and he probably tells himself that he’s someone wants to have status because he’s earned it, and not to sort of go around demanding it. This fear of infidelity and the consequences have sort of hung over this — particularly Ethan and Harper, but all four of them — in different ways across the series. I do find that so funny that after the day that they’ve had, they just come over and sit down with Ethan and Harper. And so I was mindful of that, in the playing of him through the series, always having an eye on the endgame, which for me was that ultimately, all of his actions, whether they’re kind of questionable or laudable, are kind of motivated by love and wanting to get back to a place with Harper that he thinks they should be in. The friendship he has with Cameron is so interesting and fraught. We choreographed it a day or two before with the stunt coordinators, and had a lot of fun trying to work out what’s the best sort of level of trying to make this feel real, and exciting, but also, kind of like two people who don’t really know how to fight going at each other. Ethan seemed to be bubbling up all season, and finally snapped in the finale. And I guess initially, Harper is the one who, as you say, is kind of a little bit judgmental of them. It was such a pleasure to be a part of that. That is exacerbated by the company of Daphne and Cameron, and all the different ways in which that matrix kind of interacts with itself.

First, the plot. In L'Avventura, Vitti plays Claudia, who joins her friend Anna and Anna's boyfriend on a yachting jaunt in the Mediterranean. During a brief ...

And while we don’t know if Greg is cheating on her, we know that Tanya’s preoccupied with that question even after she’s discovered he hired people to kill her for her money—tragically, they are too full of the bullets she’s just pumped into them to answer—which does seem like a kind of madness, perhaps even enough to distract her when she makes her slip-and-fall plunge off the boat and kills herself. You don’t have to let your partner sleep with someone else, but you can’t expect them not to want to, and if you can’t handle the answers, there’s nothing wrong with not asking the questions. In the finale, tensions between the season’s two married couples come to a head as Ethan, whom Harper suspects of having had sex with a prostitute while she was away for the night with Daphne, comes to suspect Harper of having had sex with Cameron. [Eros is sick](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/100-lavventura-cannes-statement)” and humanity was in the grip of a “rigid and stereotyped morality.” For all of their intellectual ideas and formal majesty, Antonioni’s movies have endured in part because of—not to put too fine a point on it—the extreme hotness of their leading actors. Daphne has some experience in these matters, and she gives Ethan the same advice she gave Harper: Do whatever you need to do to feel as if you’re even. But the shift from her customary passive aggression to open hostility—she calls Cameron “an idiot” over dinner—sets Ethan on edge, and he presses Harper until she confesses: The two did get drunk, and they did go back to their rooms, and they did kiss. (Tanya, as well as a bunch of “these gays.”) We find out that Lucia (Simona Tabasco) was definitely playing Albie (Adam DiMarco) and the man who played the part of the pimp she needed 50,000 Euros to escape is just a doorman at a nearby hotel. [hot to trot](https://slate.com/culture/2022/10/white-lotus-season-2-aubrey-plaza-jennifer-coolidge.html), but they can’t seem to get on the same page, sexually speaking. Uncertain whether their spouses have had sex but knowing for sure that they came close, Daphne (Meghann Fahy) and Ethan (Will Sharpe) walk across the low-tide sand to Isola Bella, disappearing into the forest as the camera watches from a distance. It’s Plaza’s Harper who gets the charged looks in that L’Avventura pastiche and Tanya who ends up disappearing off a boat, even if it doesn’t take that long for her body to be found. The scene in which a woman walks through a Sicilian courtyard and is menacingly leered at by a gathering crowd of men was re-created in the same location and reenacted shot for shot, with Aubrey Plaza standing in for the iconic Monica Vitti. As she and Anna’s boyfriend search for Anna, who it’s speculated may have died by suicide, they develop an attraction to each other and eventually have sex, although Claudia is consumed with feelings of betrayal toward her missing friend.

"The White Lotus" costume designer Alex Bovaird discusses the "Godfather"-inspired dress Tanya wore in the Season 2 finale, which hinted at her death.

“It’s my favorite look on her, and we did her hair like Audrey Hepburn.” “Portia is not nearly as cool or self-possessed, and the idea was that she wouldn’t always succeed with her styling,” Bovaird explains. When she starts to unwind, her costumes get more lively,” the costume designer says. “We were towards the end of the show, and it got sent back to Rome the previous night by mistake! But some of those clashing graphics held deeper meanings; the Custo Barcelona face-printed top she wears in one scene, for instance, was meant to [echo the Testa di Moro head statues](https://www.glamour.com/story/portia-style-white-lotus-season-two) seen throughout the season. In Episode 3, viewers got a close-up look at the frock on a mannequin during Bert, Dominic and Albie’s “Godfather” sightseeing tour.

Who died in the "White Lotus" finale? What mysteries were left lingering from the Sicilian escapade? What do we already know about Season 3?

“The first season kind of highlighted money, and then the second season is sex,” White said. “Did they have some kind of dalliance on the island?” White said of Ethan and Daphne. “It is somewhat of a happy ending, although there’s dark clouds on the horizon, too.” Albie eventually realizes he got played, as Lucia silently slips away from his room in the morning, but he still thanks his father and puts in a good word to Abby, his mother and Dominic’s estranged wife. After dwelling on his “blond hair and big blue eyes,” she shares a photo of her two kids in which her older child sports, you guessed it, blond hair and blue eyes that very much do not resemble her husband’s darker features. After a devastating moment of introspection from Daphne, in which she processes the betrayal in real time and promptly calculates her retribution, she leads Ethan to the isolated island of Isola Bella before the scene cuts away. It felt like she needed to give her best fight back and that she, in a way, had some kind of victory over whoever was conspiring to get rid of her. Even if Portia is rattled enough to stay quiet, Italian police quickly came across the blood-soaked yacht, and White hinted that the fallout of that investigation could find its way into a future season. “I think probably that’s just all that happened,” White said. “But I just felt like, you know, we’re going to Italy, she’s such a diva, larger-than-life female archetype — it just felt like we could devise our own operatic conclusion to Tanya’s life and her story.” Sensing the danger aboard Quentin’s yacht, as she wined and dined with his band of accomplices off the coast of Taormina, Tanya grabbed a bag meant to bring about her demise — filled with rope, duct tape and a pistol — and shot Quentin, Didier (Bruno Gouery) and Niccoló (Stefano Gianino) in a teary-eyed rampage. Having seemingly escaped the assassination attempt, she gets spooked by the yacht’s fleeing captain, then slips while trying to jump to a smaller boat below, knocking her head on the railing and drowning under the Sicilian moonlight.

An Italian-born Stanford art-history professor who specializes in the history of desire explains the centuries of turmoil that form the foundation of the ...

There, [the actors’ names appear next to mythological symbols and enigmatic figures](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/12/the-white-lotus-season-2-credits-explained/amp), reminders to the viewers of each episode that they, too, are about to enter a land of arcane meaningfulness. In Italy, [flavors are thought to be sharper](https://www.bonappetit.com/story/white-lotus-food-restaurants), love waits around the corner, and people live for theatrical emotions confident, as they are, of standing on venerable grounds. [many have noted](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/magazine/the-white-lotus-monica-vitti.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare), dramatizes privileged people’s premade fantasies of love and success, which they often transfer to one another in a furious battle for control. [an ancient vase painting of Achilles binding Patroclus’s wounds](https://recherche.smb.museum/detail/686542/attische-trinkschale?language=de&question=Sosias-Maler&limit=15&controls=none&collectionKey=ANT*&objIdx=0). Instead, the guests wonder what the message of the cautionary tale may be. Upon the guests’ requests, hotel concierge Rocco (Federico Ferrante) explains that the head-shaped vase memorializes the tale of a foreign knight decapitated by a Sicilian girl he seduced after she found out that he had a wife and children back home. And then, finally, came my discomfort at being called out in the show: As a professor of art history at Stanford University, I am the real-life equivalent of Albie’s (Adam DiMarco) teacher, the one who brainwashes students by exposing the emptiness of “the solid days of the patriarchy.” (Albie’s words, not mine. In the finale, Harper (Aubrey Plaza) calls Cameron “an idiot” to his face, echoing Cameron’s definition of Ethan (Will Sharpe) as “the original incel” in the first episode. Some of these mysteries were easier to decipher: Jack’s accent, Boohoo clothes, and overall attitude made it abundantly clear that he was hardly the member of the British billionaire family he claimed to be. I turned to Twitter and TikTok, on fire with interpretations as users speculated about the meanings of What mattered to me was what made the characters so tragic: their acting on the tales they imagined and were fed rather than on evidence. Not only do I research the ways desire and fantasies of love have shaped art and history, but I am also an Italian living and working among Americans, whose behaviors remind me of my different culture and morals, a tension made obvious in the show.

Jennifer Coolidge sits on ornate bench by luggage. Jennifer Coolidge plays Tanya, a hapless heiress in a loveless marriage. As in Season 1, Coolidge is a comedy ...

1, and that she is perhaps the worst assistant in the history of the job.) At the airport, however, we see his head—and Albie’s, and Bert’s—swivel in the wake of a pretty young woman who is passing by. (“The motivation of sex is always primary, I think,” White told me when I spoke to him, earlier in the fall for the (Daphne: “You just do whatever you have to do not to feel like a victim of life.”) Later, Ethan and Harper, each recharged with the sexual attention of someone other than their spouse, finally fuck. In the fifth episode, we discover that Jack is hiding a secret; Tanya catches him in bed with Quentin. The first season of the show focussed on class, and the conflicts that emerged between the haves and the have-nots at the White Lotus resort in Maui. (Fahy is fantastic in the role, but especially in this scene.) “You spend every second with somebody, and there’s still this part that’s a mystery. Still, to my mind, the central point made in the series is that no relationship is detached from the transactional and that power always plays a role in how people deal with one another. [New Yorker Radio Hour](https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/russell-moore-on-christian-nationalism).) Ethan and Harper are experiencing bed death; Cameron and Daphne have a de-facto don’t-ask-don’t-tell cheating policy; Albie is horny but doesn’t want to be like his father, whose marriage is in ruins owing to his sex addiction. [the second season](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/on-television/more-deadly-decadence-in-the-white-lotus) of “The White Lotus,” Mike White’s hit HBO dramedy, a bright-eyed, slim-hipped strawberry blonde named Daphne (Meghann Fahy), a guest at the White Lotus luxury resort in Sicily, decides to take one last dip in the Mediterranean before her vacation ends and she heads back home, to the U.S. Certainly, in the course of the season, we saw no shortage of conflicts that could have yielded perpetrators and victims: there was the newly rich Ethan (Will Sharpe), seething with jealousy over a possible dalliance between his wife, Harper (Aubrey Plaza, brittle and excellent), and his dick-swinging finance-bro friend, Cameron (the brutally handsome Theo James), who is married to Daphne; there was Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), a hapless heiress in a loveless marriage who, along with her assistant, Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), had fallen in with a number of sinister, Palermo-based gay men seemingly intent on stealing her fortune by any means necessary; and there was Albie (Adam DiMarco), a wide-eyed, romantically minded Stanford grad travelling with his philandering father, Dom (Michael Imperioli), and still amorous grandfather, Bert (F. But as she swims in the perfect azure waters, her dreamy immersion is shattered by the sight of a dead body, floating on the waves.

After 'The White Lotus' finale, “Arrivederci,” we know who died and who killed, but all the guests behaved badly during this Sicily vacation.

How guilty is she? How guilty is he? Her dress is awful. Of kidnapping/abducting Portia, aiding and abetting Tanya’s murder-that-turned-out-to-be-an-accidental-suicide, of “uncle”-fucking, and also of running out on that check that time, which is rude. Is Bert slipping her a $50 for that hug? Well, according to Dominic, Bert is guilty of setting the mold of womanizing and delinquent husbandry that has doomed generations of men in this family to misery. I guess it’s good for her that she gets to be the piano girl at what is apparently the only hotel in all of Sicily? Is he guilty? And I could’ve happily gone my whole life without hearing the phrase “Achilles cock.” He seemed to have a really lovely time on this trip, didn’t he? The speed with which Albie transferred the money to Lucia’s account is totally implausible (he just had her routing number??) but the fact that he was so eager to do it, and not even in installments, made me write “He actually deserves to die for the crime of being such an idiot.” It’s also funny that he is so bent on being a good person who helps a damsel in distress that he could not recognize the actual vulnerability of Portia (going to an island with her psychotic boss and a drunk she’d never met) because he was too distracted by the over-the-top performance of helplessness Lucia put on for his benefit. [It was only a kiss](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGdGFtwCNBE)” confession, do you?) But I have a hard time with this whole thing where Ethan, with very little evidence, gets to have the moral high ground, while Harper, who found the condom wrapper, is scrambling to regain his trust. Like, I don’t want to tell someone how to be abducted, but I sure wouldn’t do my big confrontation after I was trapped in a car with my assailant.

The show has experienced a ratings boom since its Oct. 30 Season 2 premiere, which garnered just over 1.5 million viewers across HBO and HBO Max on its debut ...

For Season 2 Episode 6 of “The That’s up a whopping 46% from the series’ previous best, which was the sixth and penultimate episode of the Sicily-set second season on Dec. The first season of “The White Lotus” closed with 1.9 million multiplatform viewers for its August 2021 finale. Discovery’s proprietary viewership data for streaming on HBO Max. Mike White’s dark comedy has experienced a ratings boom since its Oct. 30 Season 2 premiere, which garnered just over 1.5 million viewers across HBO and HBO Max on its debut night, up 63% in comparison to the “White Lotus” series premiere’s audience in July 2021, which also aired on HBO and HBO Max.

If you've been part of the cultural moment that is "The White Lotus," you've most probably inhaled this weekend's Season 2 finale already and are eager for ...

“The first season kind of highlighted money, and then the second season is sex,” White said. You know, we did Europe, and maybe Asia, something crazy like that, that would be fun,” White told But maybe you’ll have to wait to find out what happens,” he teased. [staggering events of the finale](https://www.cnn.com/videos/entertainment/2022/12/12/white-lotus-season-finale-cprog-cnntm-vpx.cnn), creator Mike White – who shepherded the at-first one-off limited series to a multiple Emmy-winning show that’s captured the zeitgeist and created [cringeworthy moments aplenty](https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/10/entertainment/white-lotus-cringeworthy-moments) – gave a post-credits interview that unpacked the episode. (CNN and HBO are both part of the same parent company, Warner Bros. It feels like it could be a rich tapestry to do another round at ‘White Lotus.’” (Season 1 of the show took place in Hawaii, followed by this season’s bawdy action set in Sicily.)