Murray Bartlett on filming The White Lotus: ‘How do we deal with our white privileged guilt?’
In the penultimate episode of the first season of The White Lotus, a couple on their honeymoon – whose relationship is already fraying – get a tour of their new hotel suite. Leading them is resort manager Armond, who points out that they can, actually, see the beach from this room – they just need to step onto the patio, and peer around the volcano.
There’s no better metaphor for the tensions, big and small, that have been percolating since the moment these guests first arrived in Mike White’s new HBO series – a show that’s become a rare moment of appointment viewing in our various states of lockdown, and which was renewed for a second season last week.
Set in Hawai’i, The White Lotus follows the terrible, wealthy guests of the titular resort – a family, a grieving middle-aged daughter, and the honeymooners – as they either explicitly discuss or thoughtlessly perpetuate divisions in class, race and wealth. In the opening of episode one, we learn that someone will be killed during their stay. And connecting their stories throughout, as he flits between tables or inserts chaos – deliberate and accidental – into their holidays, is the salt-and-pepper-haired manager Armond, played by the Australian actor Murray Bartlett.
Initially in control of himself and his staff, Armond slowly starts fraying at the edges. A combination of drugs that almost literally fall into his lap (he’s five years sober) and a refusal to keep up appearances fuel his slide into more nefarious territory. Bartlett has made a name playing often stoic, reliable gay characters in more wholesome ensembles; it’s fascinating to watch him take on his breakout top-billed role with villainous gumption.
When we meet on Zoom, a warm and open Bartlett is in his home in Cape Cod, Massachusetts (“It’s summer here!”), wearing a crisp navy Carhartt work shirt, his tidy Armond moustache grown out into a full beard. He’s curious about what’s happening in Australia, but his publicist steers us back to The White Lotus. Time is limited.
“I think the bigger picture of the show is what does [money, status and power] do to everyone? What does it do to everybody on every rung of [the ladder]?” he says. “It’s kind of a nightmare for everybody.”
After a string of roles in Australian TV series throughout the 90s (Home and Away, A Country Practice and – iconically – The Ferals among them), Sydney-born Bartlett relocated to New York City in the early 2000s, soon after a short but memorable role as Carrie’s new gay bestie on Sex and the City. He worked steadily for over a decade, before being cast in HBO’s Looking as Dom who, staring down the barrel of his 40th birthday, is reassessing what (and who) he’s pursued to get there.
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Bartlett’s life over the past couple of years has been filled with reassessments too. He first visited Cape Cod in mid-2019: “Just for the summer – and then I decided not to leave.” After 17 years in New York City, the change of pace appealed to him. “So I was already settled up here before the pandemic hit.”
As Covid shut down his industry, he braced for big changes. “I just assumed that I wasn’t gonna work for I don’t know how long. I was starting to think about other options.” (In an interview with the Guardian last week, his White Lotusco-star Jennifer Coolidge put it in more fatalistic terms: “I wasn’t thinking about work, because I didn’t think we’d be alive.”)
But then Armond appeared. Anticipating empty programming slots, HBO asked director Mike White to pitch them something – anything – they could make under Covid-safe conditions in a relatively short time. He settled on The White Lotus: a slow-burn social thriller featuring a dozen characters in a contained location for a week. White began writing it in August, and by October they were shooting.
It was a “dreamy job”, Bartlett says, but one that produced something like survivor’s guilt for those involved. “I found myself not talking to [people] – especially my actor friends – about it. I was like, how come I get this incredible thing in the midst of this chaotic time? I was a little bit shy to share it.”
They began the production with a traditional welcome ceremony from the local people – a ritual that White, who has a home in Hanalei, makes a point to do before his shoots. The displacement of local people is a focus of The White Lotus, which made the cast “ultra aware of it”, Bartlett says. “First of all, we’re shooting in the resort where we are, and I’m a guest here. Am I a dick to these people who are looking after me? We’re working with these Hawai’ian people – how do we deal with our white privileged guilt and try not to be insensitive and try to understand better what this whole situation is?”
Between his 2011 HBO series Enlightened and the films Beatriz at Dinner and Year of the Dog, White has a track record of making entertainment from the clash between the privileged and those they oppress.
“[The White Lotus] is a bit of a microcosm of a lot of the things we see in our societies, and [Armond is] a casualty of it as a lot of the characters are,” Bartlett says. “At the beginning, I think he’s kind of like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Even if you don’t see it immediately, [because] he can keep a lid on it and can maintain this public facade. But by the end he just can’t do it any more. He’s worn down by fighting himself, by trying to keep a lid on all the stuff that’s bubbling up in him. And he’s fed up with this insane situation that he has been living for years, trying to keep an even keel with these insane guests making obnoxious demands of him.”
Shane, the “obnoxious dick” of a guest played by Jake Lacy, is Armond’s key antagonist from the moment he arrives. A rich guy on his honeymoon, Shane is hellbent on pushing and prodding Armond until either Shane gets what he wants or Armond snaps – whatever comes first. Bartlett imagined the character as an embodiment of “the nemesis that Armond has probably always had from primary school” – always wearing, as Vulture put it, “the self-satisfied, shit-eating grin of a man who isn’t happy until he’s made someone else unhappy”.
We also learn Armond is in a hardfought journey with recovery – but details of his backstory are less clear. It’s easy to imagine he moved to Hawai’i and adopted an entirely new identity to escape something – if only because the phonetics of a name like “Armond” are in a losing battle with the Australian accent.
Watching Bartlett’s performance of a man either desperately clinging to or abandoning the facade that has got him this far, the famous line from Sartre’s No Exit rings in my head: “Hell is other people.” Regardless of who dies this weekend, we know season two will feature an entirely new cast: a different group of vacationers settling into a different White Lotus resort in a new location. Meaning that Armond – if he survives – will remain stuck in a kind of purgatory paradise forever. “There is a certain amount of him that feels trapped in this nightmarish existence,” Bartlett says.
But whether it’s Chekhov’s volcano or something else that obliterates his guests, no one who spent a week at The White Lotus – with all their petty bullshit and heavy grief and vanity and privilege – will escape unscathed.
The final episode of The White Lotus airs in the US on HBO on Friday night and in Australia on Foxtel at 11am on Monday