The three Ratliff siblings have scattered to Los Angeles and New York, far from the tropical maladies of Thailand and the third season of “The White Lotus.” They’re ready to talk about it all — the incest, the North Carolina accents, their deeply screwed-up family.
And yet, on one level, Sarah Catherine Hook, Sam Nivola and Patrick Schwarzenegger will forever remain Piper, Lochlan and Saxon, joined at the hip by a TV series that fans can’t stop talking about.
“The three of us, we are siblings for life now,” Hook says. “We couldn’t get rid of each other even if we tried.”
Not that they’ve tried. After a seven-month shoot in and around a luxury hotel in the Gulf of Thailand, it seems a certain amount of postpartum longing still lingers.
“We don’t even talk anymore,” Schwarzenegger laments.
“Don’t spread lies like that,” Hook responds. “Patrick texts us every day: ’You don’t call. You guys don’t care about me anymore.’ Bro, we just FaceTimed last night. Shut up.’”
They seem a good deal happier than their characters on the series, which is to be expected. The Ratliff kids, their mom, Victoria (Parker Posey), and their dad, Timothy (Jason Isaacs), are sterling examples of a “White Lotus” specialty: the Ugly American abroad, spoiled and clueless, mired in family dysfunction.
“It allowed for my character to have this full-blown existential crisis,” Patrick Schwarzenegger says of a much-discussed party scene in “The White Lotus.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Saxon is the preening alpha male, vocally on the prowl for sex, telling his little brother that he needs to drink more protein shakes and man up. Lochlan lives in his brother’s shadow, seeking Saxon’s approval even as he seems quietly terrified and repelled. Piper seems to be the sane one; she wants to stay in Thailand and spend a year at a Buddhist monastery, far away from her family. But beneath her white guilt she’s ultimately just as attached to the creature comforts of American wealth as the rest of her family.
Emotionally healthy people are about as rare on “The White Lotus“ as cloudy days in paradise. But series creator Mike White doesn’t write caricatures. The Ratliffs, with their North Carolina money and the neuroses to which they generally remain oblivious, are also deeply human. If they weren’t, Nivola says, they’d be hell to play.
“You always have to love your character,” he said. “You have to relate to them, because if you don’t, you’re just totally disconnected and you have no way in. And that’s a struggle for everyone in this show because to varying degrees, every character is more f— up than the average person.” (Lochlan always did have a philosophical streak.)
“You have to relate to them,” Sam Nivola says of playing a character, “because if you don’t, you’re just totally disconnected and you have no way in.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
“The White Lotus” always makes tongues wag, with plot points and character turns interminably dissected on the internet (and in articles like this one). This season’s biggest talker was a drug-infused threesome between Saxon, Lochlan and a local woman, Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon). At one point, Lochlan, ever the people pleaser, notices that his older brother is idle and decides to, er, lend him a hand. Ick.
Once the blackout fog clears and the shame descends, Saxon allows some rare moments of vulnerability to penetrate his swaggering façade. He suddenly seems real. That’s why Schwarzenegger was grateful for the season’s queasiest plot turn.
“I’m kind of relieved at how well it played,” he said. “I think I’m a little bit different than Lochlan, in that my character was so hated by so many people for the first few weeks of the season. It was a relief that people started to feel bad for me, or come around to enjoying me. It allowed for my character to have this full-blown existential crisis that we got to display onscreen.”
“People keep telling me, ‘Oh, so many opportunities to come.’ I’m like, ‘Nah, dog. This was the opportunity,” says Sarah Catherine Hook.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
The Ratliffs also had viewers talking about … talking. As the parents of the family, Isaacs and Posey used thick North Carolina accents, which tended to slosh around some depending on how much booze and anti-anxiety medication were in play. But the kids, with the exception of some open vowels here and there, sounded like pretty generic young Americans.
Like everything in the series, this was by design. “We were instructed to not have accents, to let the parents have them,” said Hook, who was born and raised in Alabama (and doesn’t have an accent). “There is more of this neutral American sound with the younger generation, and part of that is just their exposure to the media. Though I did throw in a few ‘Y’alls’ here and there because that’s my Southern thing that I keep with me.”
Now Hook, Nivola and Schwarzenegger face life after “White Lotus” — and a sense that future projects will have a hard time living up to what they just experienced. “We’re screwed,” Hook said. “What’s better than ‘The White Lotus?’ People keep telling me, ‘Oh, so many opportunities to come.’ I’m like, ‘Nah, dog. This was the opportunity.”
They’re not just spoiled for future work but for future accommodations as well.
“The f— hotels,” Nivola said. “I just stayed in a Marriott for a month, and I felt like such an a—. I was like, ‘There’s no cold plunge!’”
Typical Americans.
Sam Nivola, Sarah Catherine Hook and Patrick Schwarzenneger enjoy a “White Lotus” reunion.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
