I’d Watch A Separate White Lotus About What Happened on The White Lotus

The Friday Post.

Spoilers for The White Lotus season three finale below.

Leslie Bibb, Sarah Catherine Hook, Jason Isaacs, Patrick Schwarzenegger, and Jon Gries at HBO's The White Lotus Season 3 Finale Event at Four Seasons Hotel Westlake Village, California on April 6. (Photo: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic for HBO)

Sunday night’s 90-minute White Lotus season three finale was the amuse-bouche for the real White Lotus drama: what happened on the HBO show’s Thailand set? “It was a theatre camp, but to some extent an open prison camp: you couldn’t avoid one other,”¹ Jason Isaacs, who played Daddy Ratliff, told The Guardian in an interview published in February. “There are tensions and difficulties, I don’t know if they spilled from on screen to off-screen, or if it would have happened anyway.” (To some of us, a theatre camp is an open prison camp.)

Did Isaacs suffer more than the rest of the ensemble, or is he just more vocal about it? Shooting the show at the Four Seasons Koh Samui was “a cross between high school and Lord of the Flies,” the actor told Sharp magazine in an interview published in February. “We never got away from each other!” When the New York Times asked him about the Lord of the Flies comparison, he reiterated that the shoot “wasn’t entirely blissful” for everyone involved. “Obviously people formed friendships, but we weren’t one great big homogenous happy family. It was a large group of people away from home, unanchored from their normal lives,” Isaacs said. “I’m not going to break ranks and say who did what to whom, but it certainly wasn’t a holiday.”

Sure, totally. But who did what, and to whom? After the finale, which saw Rick (Walton Goggins) and Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) meeting their untimely demise because God forbid a man let something go, fans noticed that the on-screen couple had unfollowed one another on Instagram. Goggins posted a carousel of candids from shooting, set to “Silver Springs,” the Fleetwood Mac song in which Stevie Nicks laments her tryst with Lindsey Buckingham. Goggins didn’t tag Wood. Wood didn’t tag Goggins in her own post-finale ode to the show. (It seems quite telling that Goggins, in that Instagram, described their characters’ fates as a “love story.” Wood, in an exit interview with Variety, was not at all roseate: “I love [Rick and Chelsea] so much, but they are crazy, and they die because they’re crazy. They don’t die because it’s a love story. They die because they’re crazy.”)

Meanwhile, Cristóbal Tapia de Veer, the show’s Emmy-winning composer, had his own exit interview in the New York Times ahead of the season finale. Tapia de Veer described “hysterical” disagreements with the show’s producers. He told the Times that he was not planning to return for another season. He wanted to surprise White Lotus creator Mike White with the news “just at the end for the shock and whatever,” but music producers had already told White.

When the Times asked how White responded, Tapia de Veer demurred. “[White] says a lot of things, but I can’t really talk about that. There was a French movie, La Cage Aux Folles. You know how there’s Albin, which is like the star, and there’s Renato, who is the producer who is always taking care that Albin doesn’t lose his mind about something, because Albin is the diva and Renato is the guy who is trying to make everything work. To me, the show felt very much like that.” Given his stated desire to treat his departure like a reality TV show reveal, it’s unclear who is the Albin and who is the Renato in this scenario.

In an interview with Howard Stern, White addressed Tapia de Veer’s complaints. "I honestly don't know what happened, except now I'm reading his interviews because he decides to do some PR campaign about him leaving the show,” he said. “I don't think he respected me. He wants people to know that he's edgy and dark and I'm, I don't know, like I watch reality TV.” White said there wasn’t a feud beyond the regular working relationship of giving and receiving notes. “I knew he wasn't a team player and that he wanted to do it his way. I was thrown that he would go to the New York Times to shit on me and the show three days before the finale.”

Tapia de Veer’s media tour continues. In an interview published Friday with

The Ankler.

he said that he was set to do an interview with CNN, but alleged that HBO had the story killed.² “On one hand, people want to know about the tension and all that, so that’s not great and obviously not fun for so many reasons, but particularly to get to a point where somebody I work with, like Mike White, doesn’t truly appreciate a situation that what I gave him is truly a gift to him,” he said. “So it’s a very dark thing, you know. Out of 15 Emmys that this show has, three are mine.”³

This has all thrilled me so much more than the endless scenes of Timothy Ratliff trying to make sure his family doesn’t get their cell phones back. “Like anywhere you go for the summer, there’s friendships, there’s romances, there’s arguments, there’s cliques that form and break and reform and stuff like that,” Isaacs told “The Happy Hour” on SiriusXM’s TODAY Show Radio on Tuesday. He says he reads what people say about The White Lotus, which I believe, given how defensive he is about his Durham accent on the show. Surely he’s seen all the theorizing about what did or didn’t happen between Wood and Goggins? “Nobody has the slightest clue what they’re talking about,” Isaacs said. “People who think they’re onto something, and it then it gets magnified because of a thousand other people. Nobody has any clue.” I love a gossipy HBO patriarch. I need him going Brian Cox mode about all of it.

What the paid list got this week:
Did you watch The Pitt finale? The White Lotus finale?? Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag??? Hung Up is the place to talk about all of it.

I Love A Man With A Job (Steven Soderbergh Edition)

"How Mad Do You Think Duke Is That They're Out of the Men's Finals AND This"

That’s all this week! Thank you for reading. I am not interested in a White Lotus season three cast that doesn’t include Annette Bening.⁴ Have a good weekend!

1. British people being so blunt…

2. An editor's note from The Ankler was attached to this claim: "Sources close to the situation say this is false and that HBO has no influence over CNN."

3. He also said this truly incredible sentence: “Do you know how much Pepsi pays for something like [“Renaissance,” the season two theme song]? HBO, their fucking broke-ass — I get paid like 50 times more for something like that [for a brand], and it takes me one day, and I spend eight or 10 months on the show.”

4. And maybe her whole family, including Shirley MacLaine! Warren Beatty ordering CPK to set…