THE SUITCASE VANDAL

Murray Bartlett in The White Lotus

Murray Bartlett is on a semi-closed set in Hawaii with his pants down. A prop guy is waiting in a nearby closet for the actor to squat over an open suitcase. The take starts, Murray positions himself theatrically, and the prop guy pops out and drops a makeshift poo into the suitcase. “It’s something that you would have never imagined yourself doing,” Murray cheerfully tells Empire from his home in Cape Cod. The scene from Mike White’s luxury-resort satire The White Lotus, which Bartlett says was “awkward, bizarre, but also super-fun” to shoot, was one of the most talked-about TV moments of 2021. In the finale’s final act, Bartlett’s harried resort manager Armond — a fan favourite — is about to get fired, and decides to take revenge via a steaming farewell gift in an awful guest’s luggage. “You get to that point where you’re beyond fear or worrying,” explains Bartlett, who describes himself, like Armond, as a former people-pleaser too. “You’re like, ‘Well, fuck it, I’m just gonna go for it.’” It’s an act that cuts right to the core of the show’s messages about privilege and class; Armond is today’s everyman, gripped in a losing battle with entitlement. “He became a manifestation of the frustrations that I think we’ve all had in terms of what’s going on in the world and how divided we are politically,” says Bartlett. For the actor, the show has been a once-in-a lifetime experience, not least because of the Halloween costumes that he’s inspired: “I saw a guy who was dressed like the hotel suite. He had a suitcase strapped onto him with a big shit inside.” As far as metaphors go for the past year, there are none more poetic, nor horrifying, than Armond’s last hurrah.