The White Lotus wasn’t a walk in the park for the cast members after a seven-month shoot led to off-screen fights, according to Jason Isaacs.
Isaacs, who previously said friendships were both “made” and “lost” on the set of the HBO show’s third season, revealed he was at the centre of some drama that occurred behind the scenes.
Fans of the show are now playing detective in the hopes of unearthing exactly what happened – and are resurfacing Isaacs’ past comments on the subject.
“I can’t pretend I wasn’t involved in some off-screen drama,” the British actor said, adding: “There were times when things were not quite so fond.”
The British Harry Potter star appeared in the series as Timothy Ratfliff, with the majority of his scenes involving his family members played by Parker Posey, Patrick Schwarzeneggar, Sam Nivola and Sarah Catherine Hook.
The actor toldThe Guardian: “I was in some ways used to it, but within a couple of weeks my wife went, ‘Some of these people are f***ing mad.’ I said, ‘No, it’s just a bunch of actors away on location, love. You’ve forgotten what it’s like.’”
Isaacs is married to Emma Hewitt, a BBC documentary maker he met in the 1980s.
He continued: “It was a theatre camp, but to some extent an open prison camp” as “you couldn’t avoid one other There are tensions and difficulties. I don’t know if they spilled from on screen to off-screen, or if it would have happened anyway.”
According to Isaacs, “there were alliances that formed and broke, romances that formed and broke, friendships that formed and broke”.
He attributed the breakdown of the relationships due to being away from family “for a long period of time” as well as the “open bar and all the wildness being in Thailand allows”.
For the show, the cast were expected to reside at the resorts where filming takes place for a full seven months, essentially quarantined in one place with just the show’s cast and crew for company.
Isaac previously said the experience was “a cross between high school and Lord of the Flies”, telling Sharp: “We never got away from each other!”
He continued: “Sometimes, it was two weeks of night shoots and then you see each other all day every day. In that time, it’s incredibly hot – not fun hot, holiday hot – we’re in costume and makeup, and we’re not meant to get a tan or lie by the pool, and you can only have so many massages.”
Isaacs said that the intense filming process is intentional and creator Mike White wants to create “a pressure cooker atmosphere, not just to the story we were telling, but to our own lives”.
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