“Mike disguises his tenderness well. But it’s still there.”
On the show, the teste di moro appear in the hotel room shared by Harper and Ethan. The two think of themselves as an enlightened, modern couple, able to talk through all of their emotions with therapy-honed ease. Plaza has played a slew of characters who butt against everyday convention, from the sardonic April on Parks
and Rec to the potential sociopath in Ingrid Goes West, a film indebted to White’s homoerotic stalker movie Chuck
& Buck. Here, White tells me he thought it might be funny to have Plaza play a “normie,” or at least someone who thinks of herself as normal, well adjusted, and skeptical of
White Lotus–ian extreme wealth—until the wheels of the plot start turning. “I don’t necessarily think that some of the characters I play haven’t been normies,” Plaza tells me, deadpan. “But okay, she’s not a criminal; she doesn’t have any described mental illness. Although is anyone really a normie?”
Either way, Harper isn’t as much of a normie as she imagines herself to be once she gets to Sicily and starts hanging out with Cameron Babcock (James). Cameron flirts with Harper, though it’s hard to tell whether he’s truly attracted to her or engaging in mind games to enliven his marriage to Daphne. Both Plaza and Sharpe are biracial, while James and Fahy are white. They’re outsiders at the resort, in class as well as race, and think that, armed with therapeutic lingo and emotional oversharing, they’ve got their emotions sorted out better than their vapid friends. Maybe not. “Your sense of what makes a healthy relationship is challenged a bit,” White says.
As the sexual intrigue unfolds between these couples, their stories interlock with other dramas playing out across the hotel. Coolidge’s Tanya is on vacation alongside her beau from last season, Greg (Jon Gries). The actress is a close friend of White’s, and he just wanted to work with her again. (He has also imagined the possibility of bringing back season-one characters in, say, Japan, if there’s ever a third season.) Tanya is still adrift emotionally, hoping another trip might put her at ease. She engages in all the typical fantasies of an American in Italy, including an attempt to ride a Vespa, before a gay aristocrat played by the British “sex thimble” Tom Hollander discovers her at the resort. He becomes obsessed with Tanya, as a gay man is wont to do with any character played by Coolidge, and his clique of “international gays help her get her groove back,” as White puts it.
Tanya arrives with an assistant, a harried young woman named Portia (Richardson) who has taken the job after feeling stranded and alone during the pandemic. (Coolidge herself travels with an assistant who helps her manage things; on set, she was trailed by a harried young Italian man named Liam who always seemed to have a multitude of handbags spilling out of his grasp.) While at the resort, Portia meets a dweeby young Italian American guy (DiMarco) who is the son of a Hollywood producer played by The Sopranos’ Michael Imperioli and the grandson of a grumbling letch portrayed by F. Murray Abraham. Imperioli’s character has recently gone through a nasty breakup and is trying to keep his family together with a trip to the old country, where he’s hoping they’ll connect with relatives. The story grew out of White’s experiences traveling with his own father to find their roots in Sweden. “We ran into some woman at the cemetery who was the archivist of the town and knew the home where our family was from,” White says. “The opposite of what happens in this show, which is not such an ideal situation.”
Togetherness proves difficult across the three generations of men, each of whom has a different opinion on how males should behave in modern society. Abraham’s character, Bert, takes things to an oldfashionedly sexist extreme. The actor compares playing Bert to his experience of playing Bottom in the Public Theater’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Most actors don’t want to let the audience think they’re buffoons, so they hold back,” Abraham says. “Mike gave me permission to be an asshole.”
Weaving between the stories of the vacationers are the locals. Foremost among them are a pair of young Italian women, Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and her best friend, Mia (Beatrice Grannò), who are as intimidating as the duo of college students from the previous season played by Sydney Sweeney and Brittany O’Grady. The two hang around the resort and provide the audience with commentary on the guests as they arrive, just as Sweeney and O’Grady did. And as the season progresses, they get entangled in the vacationers’ various dramas. Both actresses have a background in Italian television, and the characters speak to each other in their native language when they’re alone. Roughly 20 percent of the season’s dialogue is in Italian, translated into Sicilian with the help of White’s on-set assistant, Chiara Nanni.
Each iteration of a White Lotus resort must have its own fearsome hotel manager. Last time, there was Murray Bartlett’s Armond, a mentally fraying addict who ends up self-destructing while trying to fulfill his guests’ needs. This season, the Italian actress and comedian Sabrina Impacciatore plays a manager named Valentina. As inspired by White’s and Bernad’s experiences with Italian hospitality during their scouting trips, she takes a very
firm approach to her guests. Initially, “I think they wanted a character who would be more rude than any Italian would be,” Impacciatore tells me. “In Italy, we are more direct. We just say what we think.”
The sun has set behind a villa perched in the hills south of Noto, and the gays have started to arrive. In half-darkness, they emerge from their trailers, primping their hair and adjusting their rompers, mingling and sharing cigarettes with a collection of older white women in caftans. The villa in question is a former monastery, available to rent for a cool €18,000 a week. It’s both opulent and, as an Italian crew member sniffs in passing, “not really Italian.” The crowd of people is also not really a crowd. The costume designer points out to me that many of the background actors populating the villa are in fact old friends of White’s. That’s his trainer. That’s an actor who appeared on the season of Survivor on which White competed. That’s the friend he met while writing in Sicily who actually does own a villa. “It felt like I was hosting a wedding, running a show, and also a guard at a mental institution,” White tells me the next afternoon. On set, he often seems quietly unflappable, but this massive affair may have him flapped.
At the center of the spectacle, there’s Coolidge, wearing a dress described as a “symphony of salmon” by Hollander’s character, Quentin, who owns the villa. He’s throwing a party for her and, seemingly, at her, leading her through a rapid-fire series of introductions to the idle Euro rich that overwhelms Tanya and, at one point, Coolidge herself. During one take, she forgets a line, and as the camera follows her careering through the maze of the villa, she simply repeats, “Hi, hey, hiii, heyyy.”
As Coolidge performs, the artifice and the emotion of The White Lotus collide. Her character so desperately needs to be liked, and yet, as with so many interactions on the show, you know she’s probably being taken advantage of. It is sometimes hard to act across from Coolidge when you play someone who might hurt her, Hollander tells me, surprisingly articulate at 4 a.m. “She’s just so good at being a bleeding, defenseless, vulnerable child in a woman’s body,” he says. (“Well, I felt very tired on this job,” Coolidge tells me after the shoot. “Hopefully because I was making myself vulnerable, but who knows?”)
Tanya could be as thoughtless as the other characters in the first season of The White Lotus—she promises to partner with Natasha Rothwell’s spa manager and fails to follow through—but she was one of the most openly yearning. Watching the party scene, I think about White as a proxy for Quentin. He’s also touring her around, putting her through her paces, making the party about her. But in writing for her, White is caring for her as an actress and a character. Tanya elicits our sympathy, both because she is the great Jennifer Coolidge and because she is always reaching for affection, especially in the wrong places.
The characters in The White Lotus expect to be transformed by their travel in some way, and while White tortures them, he allows that there is something sympathetic in their need. In the first season, he evinced a soft spot for the teenage son played by Fred Hechinger, who wanders off trying to find a place to masturbate and, by the end of the season, is taken in by the beauty of nature in Hawaii and runs away from his family to row out into the ocean. Maybe he’s immediately caught by his parents, but the fantasy lingers like the smell of salt water in the air. White’s characters are loathsome, but they are often, in complicated ways, embraced. “Mike disguises his tenderness well,” Sharpe tells me. “But it’s still there.”
Two seasons in, The White Lotus may be about the thorny possibility that ugly Americans will learn something through their travels—or that White will learn something through his own. He believes there is much to be gained from them. On the piazza in Noto, Daphne tells a story about something she once saw on a safari: The male elephants left the herd, while the females remained with the children. Men, Daphne says, think they’re so heroic off on their own, but women are living the real lives back in the herd. She is prodding Harper a bit in the scene, testing her sympathies for the men in their lives, but there’s a sweetness to the story. Daphne really does feel bad. “I think you can be sadder about the elephant,” White tells Fahy between takes.
It was White who actually experienced this on a safari in Tanzania. “You see all the elephants in the group, and they’re all the girls and the mothers and the babies,” he says. “And then you see one male elephant alone, walking in the jungle, and you’re like, Aww.” Human men, White points out, especially as they get older, can get very lonely. They don’t make friends as much; they don’t know how to rejoin the herd. White’s worlds are full of lonely men. He has played a couple of them himself: a stalker in Chuck & Buck and a corporate drone in Enlightened who gets a stand-alone episode called “The Ghost Is Seen.” The men in this season of The White Lotus happen to be pretty lonely too, measuring themselves against the machismo of the Sicilian mobsters they’ve seen in the movies or the figures modeled in pottery. The elephant story is a perfectly Mike White sort of tale, born from his travels (with Coolidge, as it turns out), premised within all the colonial implications that come with being on safari, and presenting a moral that cuts many ways at once. Who’s happier: the people in the group or the loners with all their freedom? Is real life the life in the herd? Maybe it’s a lesson about the outlook-transforming hope of a vacation—travel as far from your ordinary life as you can, you’ll still see yourself in the elephants. “It felt like an interesting analogy that I could use,” White says, shrugging, with a special emphasis on use. “Which I did!” ■