[This story contains major spoilers from The White Lotus season three finale, “Amor Fati.”]
As the season three finale of The White Lotus arrived on Sunday night, 10 members of the show’s cast gathered at the Four Seasons Westlake Village hotel to watch the episode together and give their immediate thoughts.
Jason Isaacs, Leslie Bibb, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Aimee Lou Wood, Tayme Thapthimthong, Sarah Catherine Hook, Sam Nivola, Jon Gries, Nicholas Duvernay and Charlotte Le Bon were in attendance at the finale event, as they watched the finale for the first time — and emotionally witnessed the deaths of Wood’s Chelsea, Walton Goggins‘ Rick and Scott Glenn’s Jim Hollinger.
“We were all crying backstage, we held each other for a long time,” Isaacs told the crowd. “I don’t know because if it’s this thing is coming to an end or because it’s just such a beautiful story.”
Wood was particularly emotional over the death of her character, noting how “for about two weeks before we shot it, I felt super weird. It was like this odd, ominous thing that was just hanging over us, and then it was like the hottest day ever and Walton had to like carry me so many times and it was so hot.”
“And also, you know, Chelsea doesn’t know what’s gonna happen to her, but I know, so it’s this odd thing,” she continued, musing it also “looked exactly how it felt, which is really strange” while also admitting “it’s not soaked in.”
Thapthimthong’s security guard character Gaitok shoots Rick as he’s trying to get help for a wounded Chelsea, as the actor explained, “At first I felt like I don’t want to shoot him in the back, let’s turn around and have little gunfight… but we had a discussion with Kirsten Chuba Mike [White] and I remember he said like, ‘Trust me, it will be justified.’ And I feel like it really was,” as Wood sadly shook her head.
Plenty also went on with the Ratliff family in the finale, as Isaac’s patriarch makes a plan to poison his family before changing his mind at the last minute, only for youngest son Lachlan to be accidentally poisoned and nearly die.
The group then heads home to their soon-to-be-disrupted lives, as Isaacs mused of what’s next, “I think the Ratliff wing at Duke University was probably pulled down. He, ironically, of all the characters that Mike throws into this mix, he’s the one that actually, genuinely finds real spiritual enlightenment at the end, and is OK when he looks in the water at the end.”
“What will happen to them? They’ll have to get jobs. I think that’s going to stick in Victoria’s throat quite hard,” Isaacs joked of the other family members. “I doubted them and they will be fine, they just won’t be fine in gigantic houses with huge Tesla trucks.”
Schwarzenegger — joking his character Saxon “went through the ringer, with these two girls and my brother really put me through it” — said he only read his character’s parts of the finale and was still processing the ending. He admitted to crying for Wood in the finale and said he had this “really weird feeling right now, just spending so much time with all these cast members and then watching someone die; I don’t know how to describe it, you feel like something really happened.”
Hook said of her character’s turn in deciding she couldn’t handle a year at the monastery in Thailand, “I guess she is her mother’s daughter” and raved about the storyline, saying, “She’s just a little rich girl and that’s The White Lotus, and it’s so good. And I actually feel like she kind of did the reverse of everyone” in other characters finding enlightenment and Piper coming to terms with being spoiled.
Nivola added of shooting Lochlan’s near-death, “It was really emotional. I never died in anything before, and I didn’t in this! It was fun to get to do that, like it’s a new, weird thing to pretend to die.” And Bibb reflected on the fan love of her character’s trio with Carrie Coon and Michelle Monaghan, recalling when they first read the scripts, and actresses were “like, uh, our storyline is kind of boring. Compared to, like, jerk-offs… we’re like, ‘No, you’re amazing. Oh my god, did you see what she was doing?’” But when a crew member told her their storyline was his favorite, Bibb said, “I looked at Michelle and I was like, maybe we’re not stuck. Maybe something will happen.”
Gries, who has appeared in all three past seasons, also shot down the idea he may appear in the fourth, saying, “I don’t think so, but I don’t know so. All I can say is every time I leave, I assume it’s over.”
Wood summed up the finale by celebrating how “there was a lot of hope in it and a lot of softness. All of the connections, the way the ladies connect with each other and the way the family did, I found it incredibly uncynical, especially for The White Lotus. It was very, very, very moving.”
“Obviously being the one that dies, this whole time I’ve been so sad, like Mike kills hope! Because Chelsea is hope and he kills her,” she continued. “And it’s like yeah, but then what I saw just then was like there’s so much love in it, and that’s why it’s so much more painful because you’re having to hold it all at the same time. But that’s life isn’t it? It’s love and pain all the time.”
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