The White Lotus star Jason Isaacs has opened up about his experience of being in the limelight during the third season of the hit HBO show, and says he’d “like to return to my normal life”.
Isaacs played Timothy Ratliff, disgraced patriarch of a wealthy South Carolina family on holiday at the Thailand resort, who spends the season trying to figure out how to avoid telling his wife and children that they’ve lost all their money back home.
The star was at the centre of a lot of media attention whilst promoting the show. In a recent roundtable interview with the Los Angeles Times, Isaacs talked about how he was happy to be leaving that behind.
He said: “I’m not really an actor anymore; I just do The White Lotus publicity for a job. And in the billions of interviews, people expect you to say, “It was a holiday. We were in this resort.” Well, we’re not really in the resort.
“So I’ve said a few times, ‘You make friends. You lose friends, romances or whatever; things happen between departments and all the backstage drama that we’re all used to.’ Well, the online world went mad trying to deconstruct, trying to work out who knew who and who was [doing what].”
Isaacs is referring to an interview with Vulture, in which he said that filming The White Lotus was “a cross between summer camp and Lord Of The Flies but in a gilded cage”, and that “some people got very close, there were friendships that were made and friendships that were lost”.
Those comments resulted in a lot of fan speculation, which the star responded to at the time, saying “it’s none of your business.”
At the Los Angeles Times roundtable, he continued: “Actually, I’m talking about all the crew and all the departments — not that it’s anyone’s business. But it’s trying to deconstruct what we all think of each other. And what happened there is so much less interesting than Mike White’s brilliant stories. You shouldn’t be interested in who went to dinner with who.
“I kind of wish I hadn’t opened my mouth about it, but I don’t want to pretend it was a holiday. Not just the way that the show blew up but also the level of microscopic interest in anything any of us said, tweeted, posted — there aren’t many new experiences for actors who’ve been around a long time, but this one has been shocking, and I’m quite glad that it’s abating now.”
He added: “I’d like to return to my normal life, but I don’t know how people who are uber-famous deal with it.”
Isaacs also faced some backlash to comments he made about a “double standard for men” after his much-discussed nude scene in the fourth episode of The White Lotus season three, which he later walked back.
One area of fan speculation about the show was the dynamic between stars Aimee Lou Wood and Walton Goggins, who played couple Chelsea and Rick, with some thinking they had fallen out after no longer appearing to follow each other on social media.
A confirmed conflict that emerged from the show’s third season was between creator Mike White and composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer, due to disagreements over the theme tune. Tapia de Veer won’t be returning for season four, and White called the composer’s public comments about the feud “kind of a bitch move”.