Natasha Rothwell and Morgana O’Reilly reveal what it’s like to work on The White Lotus

Natasha Rothwell is also scared for Belinda, the only consistently normal person in The White Lotus ensemble of kooks, damaged souls and narcissists.

With one episode to go in this current third season, the question of who dies at whose hands is still up in the air.

Could it be Belinda, the spa manager from the show’s first season in Hawaii, on secondment at the Thailand resort? She knows the almost certainly murderous Greg’s secret, and his attempt to buy her off with a paltry $100,000 wasn’t enthusiastically received.

It looks dicey for the well-intentioned, down-to-Earth Belinda. We’re nervous for her.

“Me too, girl! I’m scared,” Rothwell told The Nightly. “The tension is ratcheting up, it is almost unbearable.”

Rothwell, in Sydney to promote the launch of streaming service Max, on which The White Lotus and other HBO shows now call home, obviously knows Belinda’s fate. But like everyone else involved with the production, would risk life and limb if she even breathed a whisper of a spoiler.

“So, I’m glad everyone’s going to have a nice exhale or scream next week,” she added, giving nothing away. It really could go either way.

Rothwell added it was “a gift to play a character that people who watch the show just wish her well”.

The White Lotus has become a cultural phenomenon, but when Rothwell joined the cast in 2020, they couldn’t have fathomed just how much it would penetrate the zeitgeist.

She didn’t even have to audition for the role, nabbing the then-mysterious gig after a 45-minute chat with creator Mike White about something that may or may not lead to something. “The next day, I got a call from my agent being like, ‘You got the part’, and I’m like, ‘For what?’,” she recalled.

“So the stakes were very low, and to have watched it blow up to what it is, I had the choice to get swept up into it.”

Rothwell wasn’t in the second season set in Sicily but her character was written back in for the third. Rather than feel the pressure of The White Lotus’ popularity, she said it was easy to feel grounded during production because White had created an atmosphere that was “still small and creative at its heart”.

She said, “I showed up to set in Thailand and I saw the same (director of photography), the same editor, the same (assistant director) and some of the same (production assistants). It felt like coming home, even though the exterior has changed.”

Despite being the returnee in the cast, she was still too shy to approach her famous colleagues at the first cast event, until Carrie Coon made the first move.

“It is quite nerve-wracking when you look at the performers on that call sheet. There are people I’ve idolised my whole career and it’s exciting to get to rub shoulders with these greats.

“I also suffer from social anxiety and I was a wallflower at the event, I was like ‘OK, I don’t know how I got the courage to go up and talk to Walton (Goggins), to Parker (Posey) and to Leslie (Bibb). I was literally against the wall.

“Carrie Coon comes up to me and I vomited verbally. I was like, ‘I’m so sorry, I really want to come over and hang with you guys but I’m just super nervous. She just grabbed my arm and she was like, ‘We’re all over there and we’re nervous to talk to you, you’ve done this before’. Then my shoulders, which were by my ears, kind of went down.

“I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve done this before’. She reflected me back to me, which is just a part of why she’s lovely. Then, throughout, I tried to give little tips and tricks that I would’ve wanted someone to tell me in season one.”

The first season was filmed in a covid bubble but the camaraderie has carried through with subsequent productions. Filmed primarily in Koh Samui at the Four Seasons which stands in for the fictional onscreen resort, the cast and crew live and work on the premises for months, forming their own little temporary family.

When New Zealand actor Morgana O’Reilly, who plays the scene stealer Australian hotel worker Pam, arrived on set, Posey gave her a list of spa experiences — all in the name of “research”, of course.

“We just went, she took me to all the places,” O’Reilly said. “But in the end, my favourite places was just a little spot down the road from the Four Seasons.

“I know it’s controversial because everyone in the cast, you’d always hear about so-and-so at the so-and-so spa or whatever, and some of the best (massages) I had were next to the beach and it was like five bucks.”

O’Reilly pointed out that what that the foundation of what this season, set a luxurious wellness resort and spa, is about is that throwing money at bougie massages and cleanses is just a band-aid.

“There are only so many wellness retreats you can go on, but if you’re not digging down and doing the work, if you’re not embracing what is hard in your life, nothing will change. You might ease up a muscle here and there, and have a relaxing moment. But if you want a transcendent moment and if you want transformation, that hurts.

“It’s only through the hard stuff in your life that get you to those places. Maybe that’s a difficult pill to swallow when you’ve got heaps of money, and you’re like, ‘surely I can avoid the pain’.”

While she understood the appeal of avoiding discomfort, O’Reilly would always prefer authenticity.

For anyone who quickly booked themselves into the Four Seasons Koh Samui after seeing it on The White Lotus, O’Reilly recommended you actually leave the resort and walk past the tennis courts to the little beach with a tiny little Thai restaurant and a little coffee shop.

Being ensconced in luxury is “not Thailand, and it’s also not the world, this is not how we live,” she added. “I’m hyper aware of that, and if anything, it was more confronting to be like, ‘Why do a very small amount of people get this?”.

One of the reasons audiences love The White Lotus is the befuddling behaviour of its over-the-top characters, but running beneath the wild antics is a satire about bad tourism. Unfortunately, it’s a point that is often missed as the more privileged viewers rush to book those same experiences.

“Mike talked about that,” O’Reilly said. “I remember him saying that on set, ‘Everyone is going to come here and it’s just going to ruin it’.”

The 90-minute season finale of The White Lotus will stream on Max and Binge* on Monday, April 7

*Available on Binge until May 7