A part of the enjoyable of a present that resets itself with each season — like HBO’s The White Lotus, a drama that takes place at a brand new luxurious resort with a brand new solid of characters every time — is the hypothesis about the place it should go subsequent, and who will land there. On the primary depend at the least, Selection has now put us out of our distress (or, alternatively, spoiled our enjoyable): it studies that creator Mike White has settled on Thailand as the placement for his subsequent tragicomic roundelay of depressing wealthy folks.
This tracks with the theme White has mentioned he desires to discover subsequent. “The primary season form of highlighted cash, after which the second season is intercourse,” White mentioned in an HBO featurette after the finale of The White Lotus’ second season. “I feel the third season can be perhaps a satirical and humorous take a look at loss of life and Jap faith and spirituality. It feels prefer it could possibly be a wealthy tapestry to do one other spherical at White Lotus.”
In line with Selection’s sources, White has been spending time in Thailand, scouting potential places. Final week, HBO head Casey Bloys mentioned that he’d heard White’s pitch for the plot of the subsequent run of episodes of the present already. “He’s simply pitched us the concept for the third season, and it’s nice, a extremely enjoyable thought,” Bloys, who was talking at a French TV pageant, mentioned.
There’s no phrase on casting but, although Bloys mentioned that White was “casting folks you realize” however in a method that “means that you can rediscover them or see them in a brand new mild.” Between the primary and second seasons of the present, just one character returned — Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya, whose complicated, absurd, and shocking second-season arc is without doubt one of the present’s highlights. White has given no indication if any earlier characters will function within the third season.
To date, each season of The White Lotus has been shot on location at an precise 4 Seasons resort. The primary season came about on the Hawaiian island of Maui, and the second on the Italian island of Sicily. The 4 Seasons has 4 resorts in Thailand: within the metropolis of Bangkok, amid rice rice fields at Chiang Mai, by sandy seashores on the island of Koh Samui, and the Golden Triangle, a tented journey camp within the jungle. Koh Samui matches the White Lotus method the perfect, maybe — though, who doesn’t need to see some existentially confused one-percenters dropping it on a journey to the guts of the darkness within the jungle, like some form of five-star Apocalypse Now?
