Jason Isaacs is desperate for a game of tennis, which isn’t exactly a secret, because he’s brought his racket to set with him. “Do you play?” he asks me hopefully as the crew prepares for another take.
Few would begrudge Isaacs for taking advantage of the top-notch facilities at the Four Seasons Koh Samui, which has been transformed into luxury resort the White Lotus for Season 3 of HBO’s eponymous hit back comedy, which debuts Feb. 16. After a first season in Hawaii that took on power dynamics, and a second season in Sicily focusing on sex, this latest installment takes place in Thailand with a storyline entwining Eastern spirituality and death. Although Isaacs isn’t fully convinced about the accuracy of that billing.
“There seems to be a lot of power and sex going on in this one too!” he says, with a laugh. “The human condition doesn’t change that much. The characters don’t all leave enlightened, that’s for sure.”
What’s not up for dispute is that Isaacs plays Southern financier Timothy Ratliff, who he describes as a “fat cat firmly at the heart of the establishment in North Carolina.” Ratliff is on vacation with his family—played by Parker Posey, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sarah Catherine Hook, and Sam Nivola—while secretly facing “the 12 horsemen of the apocalypse galloping paths towards us,” as he puts it.
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It’s familiar fodder for fans of Lotus, which has made an artform of lampooning entitled, pampered Western vacationers and their cringe-worthy relationships with beleaguered hotel staff. “Mike likes to write stories about people who look like they’re leading lives of extraordinary privilege, but who are having the worst time of their life,” says Isaacs. “No one wants to see rich people having a good time; he gives you exactly what you need—people whose lives are absolutely falling apart.”
It so happens that we’re chatting in the Four Seasons Samui’s poolside rum vault, whose walls are lined with dusty bottles of extremely rare and expensive liquor. For the purposes of filming, the vault has doubled as a screening room largely because it’s one of the few climate-controlled respites from the 110°F heat outside. It’s a private place on a busy set, but perhaps the wrong place to interview someone who has been open in the past about his struggles with addiction. His Lotus character also seems to have his fair share of demons. “I don’t draw on anything,” he shrugs. “What is acting? It’s ‘what if.’ What if aliens were coming? What if I was a wizard? What if I was a soldier in this crisis? So I don’t consciously draw on anything; I try to feel and imagine what the character is feeling. But if you’re thinking about the time your cat died then you’re not in the moment. The older I get, the less preparation I do, the less I have any sense of any technique.”
It’s a perhaps surprising revelation given Isaacs’ range throughout his lengthy career. Born in Liverpool, Isaacs, 61, studied law in university before turning to acting. He rocketed to international fame starring opposite Mel Gibson as Colonel William Tavington in the 2000 historical epic The Patriot, followed by acclaimed performances in everything from Black Hawk Down to the Harry Potter franchise.
Isaacs was drawn to The White Lotus for several reasons, including working with creator Mike White. Did the spiritual aspect of this Lotus season strike a chord at all? After all, Isaacs was raised Jewish though concedes today to being a sort of spiritual atheist. “I’ve never believed in any kind of God at all, which leads to trouble,” Isaacs shrugs.
Isaacs says there’s few better auteurs to explore this stuff than White, who first conceived of Lotus and writes and directs every episode. “He’s just a brilliant storyteller,” says Isaacs. “The glorious thing about Mike’s writing is that he leads you down a path when you suddenly realize that the action’s all behind you, or to the left or right. So he sideswipes the audience. But also the nuance of who you think these people are when they first arrive and who they turn out to be and how they react to situations.”
It helps that Isaacs and White are very much on the same page when it comes to the creative process. “That’s why it’s such a joy to work with Mike,” he says. “There’s no infrastructure for the scene—this is a bit where you shout; this is a bit where your voice cracks—there’s none of that stuff,” says Isaacs. “There are actors who plan a performance and you stand opposite them. And frankly, if you levitated or if you pulled your eyes out they wouldn’t change a blink from their plan. I trust by now if you’re lucky enough to have access to writing like this, a man at the helm like Mike who is not going to let you fall, you just arrive and see what happens.”
Not to say that a free-wheeling approach doesn’t bring its own complications when the script can be swapped out for White’s latest thought shower at a moment’s notice. “I found it very challenging,” Isaacs concedes. “I’m not quite sure what the mood should be, the tone should be, the pace should be. I never let anybody so inside the process as I have on this. I know that’s true for many of my colleagues, just because we’re shooting out of order, the whole thing is in his head, also, he’s anarchic; he wants to cause trouble.”
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White’s style is certainly very different to what Isaacs experienced on 2017 black comedy The Death of Stalin, which despite its irreverent, spontaneous tone, was in fact meticulously overseen by writer and director Armando Iannucci, the Emmy-winning creator of Veep. “I think I improvised two lines on The Death of Stalin and Armando never let me forget which!” says Isaacs. Though in some ways, Isaacs pauses, “they’re very similar,” he adds. “Because here’s one person at the helm and everybody’s trying to please daddy. If you can make Armando laugh, then you feel like you’ve achieved something.”
Still, working with White requires a leap of faith that everything will work out in the end. “I’m older than most of the other actors [in Lotus] so I’ve been around a lot of stuff,” he says. “The expectations are so high and, whatever the public makes of this, the process of making it is pretty magical. For me, I’ve got to the stage where it’s all about the journey. And this is such a gift to be around that Machiavellian madman at the helm of the ship.”
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Certainly, the filming process—with cast and crew all living and working in the same resort for months on end—helped build familial bonds between each. “One of the reasons people are drawn into this business is about replacement families,” he says. “Everyone’s mold is a little bit cracked. A part of what drew me when I started doing plays in college was there’s a ready-made village.” Isaacs says the allure of show business isn’t really what the public thinks—red carpets and A-list parties—but “precisely this: You’re with a group of people, you get very intimate, and then you rely on each other.”
Still, there is naturally a moment when the gloss disappears. “This stage [in June] when we’re five or four months in, we all recognize it’s been an enormous privilege, and we can’t wait to tell people about it when we don’t need air conditioning to breathe,” he says. “There’s a point at which the whole summer camp thing wears off and I can’t remember ever being anywhere else, knowing anyone else. or doing anything else. My real life seems like a distant memory.”
