SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for Season 3, Episode 6 of “The White Lotus,” now streaming on Max.
Jason Isaacs is fashionably late to our Zoom interview, but only because he got caught up gabbing with another journalist.
“I’m just yakking on for too long,” the “White Lotus” star says. “I know they want a short answer, and I suddenly find myself talking, trapped in a web of my own making.”
Before we get going, though, he inquires about the myriad Polaroids on my wall, before asking bluntly: “You’ve seen six episodes. Who dies?” I tell him my prediction, and he humors me: “I love your theory. But I have a pretty good poker face. You’ll never get it from me.”
He does offer a potential hint at who winds up six feet under in Season 3 of the HBO dramedy. “Mike White doesn’t do justice,” Isaacs says of the series creator’s motivations. “He’s not Agatha Christie, it’s not like the person who we want to die will die by popular vote. He does whatever he finds interesting.”
All that is to say this is a comprehensive interview, one in which Isaacs goes deep on playing the Southern patriarch Timothy Ratliff, whose life begins to fall apart while on vacation in Thailand after he gets word that journalists have uncovered some of his shady business dealings, and the FBI raids his office. Timothy hides the truth from his family, as he tries to protect wife Victoria (Parker Posey) and his three kids, Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) and Lochlan (Sam Nivola) from what’s happening. But as things get worse he considers suicide — and pops a lot of Victoria’s Lorazepam.
“When it eventually dawns on him that there is no way out, his mind spins into hysteria, and he’s desperate to stop the noise — so he starts chugging his wife’s drugs,” Isaacs says. “By Episode 6, he’s listening to his children and wife speak about their future, and he knows that none of that can possibly happen. Their lives as they’ve known them are completely over. His wife is going to have to be folding T-shirts at Gap if she wants to afford food.”
Isaacs hints at a reckoning in the final two episodes of the season, and discusses the “pressure cooker of human behavior” on set. Plus, he details a horrific injury while filming that caused his head to “explode” with blood, and suggests who should replace him as Lucius Malfoy in HBO’s upcoming “Harry Potter” series.
Timothy has been spiraling for six episodes. As an actor, how exactly do you calibrate and pace that unraveling?
It’s the thing I was most worried about. When I read the scripts, I told Mike White I didn’t know how to, without words, share with the audience the different degrees of this in a way that’s interesting. I feared it might get boring. Plus, I asked my brother, who’s a psychiatrist, what would happen if I started chugging Lorazepam. He said, “Well, you’d just fall asleep.” And I went, “Right, that’s not interesting. What else have you got?” And he went, “There’s nothing else.” I worked with Mike on the phone calls, which, in the show, are more of a problem than they were in the initial scripts. It becomes clear there’s no way out, and lawyers can’t help him. I didn’t want that to happen too early, because this is a guy with such resources that he’s always been able to jam up the legal system and spike stories.
So, how do I calibrate it? I tried to feel like it was a crack and then a fissure and then a pothole and then an abyss. You’ll see what Mike wrote for me. It was a challenge as an actor to get to those places emotionally. This guy is suicidal and homicidal. He’s at the edge of human experience, and you have to try and get there without fucking up the other actors and going full method.
Courtesy of Stefano Delia/HBO
How do you get to those places, inhabiting a guy who puts a gun to his head?
As I get older, I don’t plan anything. In the minutes before someone says “action,” I keep my mind as free and blank as possible, and I try to allow Tim in. When you have to cry, instead of thinking about the time your dog was run over, I try to be upset about the things my character is upset about. Some people have to go full method, some people stick broken glass in their shoes, some people look at photographs of their dead relatives. For me, I clear the decks and pray that something arrives.
Have you actually heard of other actors putting glass in their shoes?
I’ve heard of actors putting pins in their hands for physical pain, or doing things to make themselves limp. All these stories about Sir Laurence Olivier asking Dustin Hoffman after he stayed up all night, “Why don’t you just try acting?” You know what? I don’t give a fuck what Dustin Hoffman did. He was brilliant in “Marathon Man.” I don’t care what Daniel Day-Lewis gets up to — I like watching him do those things. I don’t do any of that stuff, I just trust that it’s going to come because the writing is good enough.
How does living in the hotel where you’re filming affect that process?
To go away for seven months and live in the same building with all the actors and crew, many people’s anchors are missing. They’re a long way from home and the normal mores of social behavior. I’m not sure it affects the work that much, but you certainly form bonds pretty early on. As time goes on, it gets pretty “Groundhog Day”-ish. I had more time off than I’ve ever had on location. “Peter Pan” was 14 months, but I was on every day. On “The White Lotus,” 80% of the time I’m not working. So, I became very close with Patrick and Sam and Sarah Catherine, and we did a billion trips together. Before my wife arrived, they kept me company. I was lonely. I was given a giant villa with a butler and my own full-size swimming pool, which looked great when I FaceTimed my friends, but actually I was very isolated. So, they came over every day and we felt like a family. But it’s the same people for a long, long time, and it became a real pressure cooker of human behavior. People went through a lot, and you go down some interesting cul de sacs. What I’m saying is there was an off-screen “White Lotus” as well as an on-screen “White Lotus.” But as Mike wrote in the show, “What happens in Thailand stays in Thailand.”
Courtesy of Fabio Lovino/HBO
Some of your co-stars have mentioned the intense heat, food poisoning and insects.
Oh, my God! Some people think we’re on a holiday, because they’d like to go to Thailand for a week or two. They’ll have a lovely time if they sit by a pool or go snorkeling or whatever. We’re not doing any of that stuff. We did a little bit at the beginning — you get a couple of massages — but that wears thin pretty quickly when you’re filming in 100 degrees. It’s egg-frying, tooth-meltingly hot and incredibly sticky, and there are insects everywhere. You’re often in interior scenes, with a door shut and hot TV lights on you, and you’re there for 12 or 13 hours. It’s difficult to function and breathe, and people are passing out. I’m not playing a giant violin for us all — we were away in Thailand. But it was not the paradise that people might imagine.
You and your “White Lotus” family watched Bravo’s “Southern Charm” for inspiration. People believe you modeled your character off of Thomas Ravenel, the show’s former cast member who is from a very rich Charleston, South Carolina family.
Funny enough, some of my castmates think I did. Mike did send me Thomas to look at before we started the show. His demeanor is interesting, because he comes from generational wealth, but his accent is wrong. The music of his accent is fine — it’s very different on “Southern Charm” from when he was campaigning politically. But a Durham accent has two completely different vowel sounds from Thomas. They have a diphthong and a short “O” sound. In the end, it was an amalgamation of the musicality of his voice and his tone of entitlement, and some Durham politicians who have the authority and power I was looking for in Tim.
Stefano Delia/HBO
What did you think when you first heard Parker Posey’s accent?
Well, you know, I’m doing Durham, North Carolina, which is very specific. She could do whatever she likes, because we don’t know where she came from to marry me. Plus, she’s out of her head on drugs. So, I thought, Parker’s going big and she’s going to be funny as hell. Mike was shrieking with laughter at almost everything she said, and then shouting encouragement from behind the camera to push her and me to do even more outrageous things.
Did she ever make you break?
She didn’t make me break, because I’m trying to be Tim, and Tim’s having the worst fucking holiday anyone’s ever had. When I was not filming and watching her, I’d be laughing off camera.
What are the logistics of filming phone call scenes? Who were you talking to?
Nobody! It’s really hard. Phone acting is a very particular skill. There was an assistant director speaking to me sometimes, but often nobody because I was too far from the camera. Six months later, I was with Ke Huy Quan or Scott Galloway on the phone. I went to Scott Galloway’s flat in New York and walked him through every syllable of it, because although he is a brilliant man, he’s not an experienced actor. It was tough to help them because I’d gone off script quite a lot, and I had to remember what I said so they could record bits that would fit and make it look like a conversation.
You helped him record his side of the call?
Yeah, he’s got a place in New York where he records his podcast with Kara Swisher, and she had to wait while we did it. It took a lot longer than we were planning, because he’s not a natural actor. I wanted to get him to respond to me in the moment, not say the things that were written down. I went, “Look, I’m not directing you. Do whatever feels right to you.” And he goes, “But you were there in the scene.” So here I was, trying to recreate my performance six months later, thousands of miles away, so he had something to react to.
Why does Timothy have such a visceral hatred for Walton Goggins’ character, Rick?
First of all, Timothy’s family doesn’t normally travel with other people. They go on private planes to mansions or villas with private staff. So he’s slumming it, coming to Thailand. There was a line that didn’t make the final cut where they asked, “How was your journey?” And I went, “Long. Flew commercial, saved the planet.” Like, he wants credit for actually taking a commercial flight. So being in the company of these lesser mortals is a compromise for him. And then Rick smoked in front of me and then got in my face and in my son’s face. He’s an alpha male, Timothy. He’s a big-swinging dick of Durham, and people just don’t do that to him. He’s trying to be pleasant, and this guy was just a dick to him. He doesn’t put up with that stuff.
How did you approach bringing warmth to Timothy? My first impression of Tim was: Clearly he’s been up to some shady stuff, but I can’t help but like him!
He loves his kids. He’s relatively warm and charming. He’s not Rick, who’s insanely grumpy and bitter and angry about stuff. He’s not a terrible guy. Even with Pam, his temper doesn’t run that short. I know who I’d rather have at my dinner table between Tim and Rick.
Do you think his turn toward spirituality…
You think he turns toward spirituality? That’s interesting.
Well, he’s looking for answers from a monk, no?
He’s looking to find out what death brings, because he’s thinking about dying and/or killing people. Is death going to be better than this? Because I can’t think of any other way out. And the monk says, “You get sprayed up in the end, you’re separated from people, but then you rejoin humanity.” And that is some comfort to him. Remember, he’s drugged out of his head as well. But he’s thinking about rejoining humanity. He’s been so separate from them all his life, feeling like he’s better than them. And what’s about to happen is the worst thing imaginable. So, I don’t think it’s a turn toward spirituality, but it’s an answer he’s glad to hear.
Do you think religion or spirituality is part of Tim’s past?
He’s gone through the motions of it. They go to church, regular stuff. I don’t think he believes. He believes in money and power and status. The answer the monk gives him provides him some solace. But the only thing that he’s thinking is, “What happens if I die?”
Which of Tim’s kids does he respect the most?
I don’t know if he respects any of them. He loves Piper because she’s his little girl, and he’s got a particularly antediluvian approach to gender and sex. I think he looks at Saxon and sees a terrible desperation in trying to ape him. He loves him for it, but it feels so wrong. He’s in his father’s shadow while trying to be as potent with as many women as possible — look at Timothy, still with his wife who he met at a debutante ball. And he looks at Lochlan and doesn’t know what he’s done to deserve that. He looks at him hunched over and skinny and all those things that Tim and his world have always categorized as a loser. I don’t know if the word “respect” is right. They’re his kids. You love your kids. The question is, once shit hits the fan, will any of them ever be able to cope with it? Who will be brought most low by this?
What would he think about his two sons getting, uh… intimate with each other?
I don’t know, I’m not going to speculate on things that don’t happen. It’s not something he would think about. Who would think about that with their children? Nobody!
Sam Nivola told me you walked through a glass door while shooting the boat scenes.
Well, that’s not true. I ran into a glass door. Rather, I headbutted a glass door. I took one step, knocked myself out. I was caught by the second [assistant director] who told me I was out for a while. I don’t think that’s true. I went to shoot and they said, “What are you doing? You’ve cut your head,” and I went, “Have I? I’ll just put my hand over my face.” They went, “Your head has exploded, Jason. Look in the mirror.” It was a giant split with blood going everywhere, and it was clear I wasn’t going to be shooting for a while. We did shoot eventually, and they had to take the wound out with CGI. Miraculously it healed. Nothing else in that humidity healed — scabs were there for seven months — but this thing on my head that went right down to the bone healed very quickly.
Well, I’m glad you’re OK.
When we did the junket, all the actors were in one place doing hundreds of interviews, and people asked, “Is there a funny story from the set?” For some reason, everybody’s funny story was about how Jason split his head open.
I’m sure you know HBO is making a “Harry Potter” TV series. Who would you cast to play Lucius Malfoy if you were in charge?
Meryl Streep. She can do anything, that woman. There’s literally no limit to what she can do.
What advice would you have for anyone stepping into a role on a franchise of that caliber?
I wouldn’t have any advice at all. Why would I bother? I know some of the people they’re casting already. They’re brilliant actors. It’s going to be fantastic, and the last thing they need is advice from some old fart like me.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
