Mike White Promises a Much Darker Season of “The White Lotus”

January 31, 2025

The White Lotus creator, Mike White, has been refreshingly candid about what the thematic framing has been around the first two seasons. Season one, set at the titular resort’s Hawaii location, was about money, White has said. Season two, set in Sicily, was about sex. Each season, however, dealt a deliciously dark twist at its end, with season one’s hotel manager, Armond (a perfectly cast Murray Bartlett), meeting a grim fate, while season two kicked off by letting viewers know it would end in death, and then delivering on that promise with gusto—and dispatching the beloved Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya McQuoid, along with a boat full of her would-be assassins.

This makes his comments about season three even more interesting. Speaking with Time, White teased that this upcoming season, set in Thailand, would be considerably darker than the previous two. In fact, “much, much darker.”

“I do feel like the other seasons were a rehearsal for this one,” White told Time, from Phuket, Thailand, the set of season three. “If you’re in some place where it’s a different culture, different language, different vibe, and you’re also dealing with heavy personal things [there are moments where] you feel like, ‘Should I just walk into the water?’”

White also said that while Coolidge delivered the most iconic sustained performance of the first two seasons, appearing in both, he’s hopeful there are characters in season 3 that can match her. “How do you go about replacing Jennifer?” White asked Time. “It’s not just the creative part, but she’s a very good friend and also a big part of the show just as a person. I’m not friends with the cast the way that I’m friends with Jennifer. But there’s definitely some performances I feel rival her as far as hopefully iconic performances.”

The characters in the first two seasons certainly had their share of existential crises. Fraying marriages, fraying relationships between parents and their children, fraying friendships, a creeping sense of dread that the glitz and the glamour of an expensive life don’t equate to happiness. A creeping sense of dread, if you’re Tayna McQuoid, that someone is trying to kill you. In the season three trailer, we meet a trio of friends who have come to Thailand to unwind—Leslie Bibb as Kate, Carrie Coon as Laurie, and Michelle Monaghan as Jaclyn—but the tension is teased as the old friends reckon with who they’ve become. We got a shot of Walter Goggins as Rick getting romantic with his girlfriend, Aimee Lou Wood’s Chelsea, but glimpses at their relationship later in the trailer spell trouble.

Carrie Coon, Michelle Monaghan, Leslie Bibb. Photograph by Fabio Lovino/HBO

Walton Goggins, Aimee Lou Wood. Photograph by Fabio Lovino/HBO

Goggins revealed to Time that Rick is in bad shape when he gets to Thailand. “He is angry, and he’s bitter about the hand that life has dealt him,” Goggins said.

The official trailer includes glimpses at all the major players, including Jason Isaacs as Timothy, a wealthy businessman traveling with his wife, Victoria, played by Parker Posey, and his daughter Piper, played by Sarah Catherine Hook. Timothy’s got some major issues at work, serious enough that he thinks he might be going to prison.

“They’re all in some kind of hurt,” White said of season three’s guests. “Like, they’re all dead, but they don’t know it. … because it’s dealing with these existential tropes of facing into the nothingness of self [and] Buddhist themes that have life and death and ethical aspects, [the season] just got more heavy.”

White said that he’s had a tough year himself, which inspired him to explore the existential crises that come for us all.

“It’s been a hard year for me personally,” White said. “My parents are getting older, and there’s a lot of stuff going on at home that’s not fun.”

Season three was filmed at the Four Seasons Koh Samui, a lavish, lush property that draws wealthy visitors from around the world. There was record-breaking heat during the production, and the filming schedule made it so life started imitating art. The cadence was two weeks of filming breakfast scenes, then two weeks of lunches, then two weeks of bedroom drama, and finally, two weeks at sea. The cast then just naturally bonded with their onscreen travel buddies.

“The distance is really disappearing between fiction and reality because we’re living in the show. It’s so weird. It’s all very meta,” Aimee Lou Wood told Time.

Initially, White had intended to film season 3 in Japan, but eventually, Thailand became the more attractive option for ease of production. Yet it was his own bout with mortality that gave White the arc of season 3. All it took was being hospitalized with severe bronchitis.

“I didn’t sleep for like two nights, and by the next morning, I was like, ‘I think I have the plot.’ The season is pretty much what happened that night.” White had fever dreams and was ultimately put in a nebulizer, a device that converts liquid medications into a mist that can be inhaled. “I felt like I had the ending. And so I was like, ‘I guess we’re shooting in Thailand.’”

White has filmed in Thailand before, but not as a creator or director—as a contestant on the 14th season of The Amazing Race. That season was set in Phuket, and White and his father, Mel, were sequestered in Koh Samui. “I would’ve hated to have gone through the rest of my life having some bad association with Thailand,” said White, and filming The White Lotus season 3 there changed that for him.

“It has this paradisiacal but surreal feeling,” White said of filming season 3 there. “Embedded into the show is a little bit of Hotel California — you can check in, but you can never leave.”