Two islands of temptation for the third season of ‘The White Lotus’: Koh Samui and Phuket

In one of the first sequences of the third season of The White Lotus, which premiered Sunday, February 16, on Max, a boat is sailing through Thai waters, carrying a collection of new characters.

We meet a couple whose big age gap is just one of their many oddities. There’s also a wealthy family from the conservative American South: a businessman father, an overmedicated mother and their three children. Then, there are three childhood friends who are travelling together to strengthen their relationship. They love each other... in their own way. And Belinda — the character played by Natasha Rothwell in the first season — reappears: she plays an exhausted spa manager who is visiting a hotel in Thailand to learn new techniques to set up her own business.

“This time, the characters’ conflict arises when they travel to a place where they seek to connect with their spiritual side [...] Instead, they find that they must confront their most primal impulses,” Mike White explains. The co-creator of the series spoke with EL PAÍS in April of 2024, during a break from filming the latest batch of new episodes in Thailand. This newspaper traveled to Southeast Asia as a guest of the streaming platform.

The new season laughs like never before at what is a constant theme in its plots: death. It’s not a spoiler to note that the first episode begins — as is already tradition — with an ambiguous death. The particular narrative game of the series takes the viewer back to the beginning of the trip, when a handful of wealthy (and almost always unhappy) clients are interacting with the workers of a luxury resort. This time, the action takes place on an exotic island… but no matter how many miles separate them from their place of origin, the guests bring along all of their toxic relationships and their secrets. They also experience cultural clashes with the locals.

In addition to the spirituality that a Buddhist enclave brings (and the cultural appropriation that this entails), this new season of The White Lotus — which has already confirmed a fourth batch of episodes — deals with concepts such as death and identity.

A feverish delirium sets the tone for this third story. White describes season three as the darkest season. In addition to being a successful showrunner of this series, the American is a recurring contestant on reality shows such as Survivor. He got to know the island of Phuket — one of the Thai locations this season — after having been eliminated (along with his father) from The Amazing Race.

While he didn’t have a positive memory of Thailand, he decided to return to the country to see if it could be the location for the third season. This time, however, he interacted with local people, rather than with a handful of American reality show contestants. He admits that his second experience was much more satisfying. But an unexpected case of bronchitis put him in a Thai hospital. Hooked up to a nebulizer, which allowed him to inhale medication, he spent two days in bed without being able to sleep.

“The good thing is that I left [Thailand] with a pretty clear idea of what the season was going to be like. The bad thing is that, today, I don’t know how to explain to the actors where all my personal shit [that’s in the script] came from,” the creator told EL PAÍS.

Jason Isaacs — who acted in the Harry Potter saga, as well as in series such as Star Trek, The OA and Awake — says that the way in which White directs the actors has made this a special series. In The White Lotus, he plays the patriarch of a well-off family who suddenly begins to receive bad news over the phone about his business in the United States, all while trying to appear normal to his wife and children. “Mike is very good at writing about incredible people in horrible situations… at making the viewer want to see certain things that nobody would want to experience. He knows how to revel in them, without creating repulsion,” the actor notes, after filming a scene with Parker Posey, who plays his wife in the series. “But a good script isn’t enough to carry out a series [like this one]. The key is to create the right climax. Mike forces his actors to surprise themselves, even to shock themselves,” he continues.

In the scene that Isaacs and Posey were filming, which, as is almost always the case in this series, takes place around a table, Sarah Catherine Hook (who plays Piper, one of their three children) also appears. She’s the one who has brought her family to this Thai resort, where guests are invited to leave their cellphones and other electronic devices behind so that they can have a screen detox. Attracted by the opulence of the place, the couple discovers that their daughter is there to let them know that she wants to make an unexpected change in her life. Meanwhile, Lisa Manobal — a Thai rapper who is one of the members of the South Korean pop band Blackpink – is part of the team that works at the hotel. She flirts with the security guard of the premises, played by Tayme Thapthimthong.

The cast spent six months in Thailand, filming mainly in Phuket and at the Four Seasons on another Thai island, Koh Samui, where rooms cost more than $2,000 a night during high season. Despite their exorbitant prices, reservations at the hotel chain’s branches that served as the settings for the two previous seasons of The White Lotus — in Maui (Hawaii) and Taormina (Italy) — increased drastically after the hotels appeared in the series.

For David Bernard, executive producer of this black comedy, the Thai environment, with temples, natural landscapes, as well as the chaotic and ultra-modern city of Bangkok, invited them to film more outdoors. “The story, revolving around religion, builds a kind of heaven and hell. There’s more adventure (and more temptation) than in previous seasons,” he commented to EL PAÍS from behind the cameras.

White celebrates that the streaming platform Max has dared to bet on such a drama… one that certainly keeps him on his toes. “I started out working as a screenwriter on shows like Dawson’s Creek, where you have to maintain the romantic tension between the main characters for years and years. The great advantage of The White Lotus is that I can tear down the house and rebuild it from the ground up with each new season. That helps a lot to keep the story fresh.”

“[Compared to my past work], the challenge here is the opposite: knowing if we can create something new each time,” the showrunner concludes.

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