‘The White Lotus’ Star Carrie Coon on Laurie’s “Humiliating” Hookup

Warning: Spoilers ahead for season three, episode seven, of The White Lotus.

When I tell Carrie Coon, one of the stars of the third season of The White Lotus, that I’ll be going on a vacation with several of my longtime girlfriends next month, she gives me one piece of advice: “Just start in a really honest place. Just get into that hotel room and put it all out there so you can have a good time without all the passive-aggressive stuff going on.”

That’s pretty much the opposite of what her character on the show, Laurie, does with her childhood friends Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Kate (Leslie Bibb) on what was supposed to be a relaxing vacation in Thailand. Their long-standing issues with each other simmer beneath the surface, finally boiling over in the seventh episode after Laurie learns that Jaclyn slept with their Russian health mentor, Valentin (Arnas Fedaravicius).

Coon says White Lotus creator Mike White dreamed up the trio after he witnessed three blond women on vacation together whom he couldn’t tell apart. Whenever one would leave the group, the other two would gossip about her. For Coon, diving into that dynamic was fascinating. “I’m sort of the Jaclyn of my friend group in a way, right? Because I’m now one of the most famous people from my hometown,” says the Ohio native, who recently appeared in the Netflix film His Three Daughters and also currently stars on HBO’s The Gilded Age. “I haven’t changed, but their relationship to me has changed.… So there are a lot of complexities within that relationship that I understand maybe from the other side.”

In episode seven, Laurie decides to venture out on her own after falling out with her friends. She meets up with Valentin and his crew at a Muay Thai fight, and ends up having sex with one member of the group, Aleksei (Julian Kostov). But then Aleksei reveals his true motivations, crushing Laurie—who has to make a quick exit out the window after Aleksei’s girlfriend shows up. Coon spoke to Vanity Fair about crafting Laurie’s look and dancing style, what it was like to finally have the friends speak honestly to each other, and how many times she actually jumped out of that window.

Vanity Fair: It is amazing how right Mike gets female friendship, because sometimes male writers don’t succeed there.

Carrie Coon: Absolutely. They get totally exposed by female friendship or female characters. Mike, he could play any of them. We had a night when we were shooting the club scene in episode five, and we were dancing. We’d been working a long day. And we said to Mike, “show us how the characters dance.” How does Patrick Schwarzenegger‘s character dance? And he did this macho [dance]. We went through several of the characters, and Mike nailed exactly what those people would’ve been delivering on the dance floor. It just goes to show how thoroughly he has examined them. He just knows all the characters inside and out.

Laurie gets a lot of dancing moments. I love her drunk dance beside the pool on the way back to her room. How close is all that to your own physicality?

This is revealing: When my family saw that episode, they said, “it’s nothing we haven’t seen you do at a wedding.” So I think in some ways that was really close to my energy. That little walking away dance, I think of as a tribute to my own mother. And I was singing the song “Scrubs” too, which is just a tribute to my generation. That stuff is really fun, because so often the characters I’m asked to play are existing in a very dramatic world. In Gilded Age, it’s just actually physically restrained by the costume. So whenever I’m asked to do something more expressive physically, it’s thrilling.

Are there any choices she makes that you found difficult to wrap your head around?

Certainly the life she’s chosen for herself is far from me. I did actually speak to one of the moms from [my kids’] school who is a corporate lawyer. I went to her house and we sat down and talked about her day, what it looks like, what are the challenges of that career, what are the challenges specifically for a mother who’s trying to ascend in that world? What are her pet peeves about writing about lawyers that they get wrong? And I guess she and her lawyer friends are feeling very seen right now, so I have to give her some credit for that. Thank you, Andrea!

How much did you weigh in on what you thought she’d wear on vacation?

For Alex Bovaird, our costume designer, the direction from Mike is that these women are interchangeable. So she was coming with these racks of clothing that she thought were appropriate for the show. And then we were kind of coming in to say more specifically who our person was, because of course, that’s the trick of the show: You’re supposed to perceive us as all the same and think you know who we are. And then as the story unfolds, we become differentiated and maybe a little more complex than your first impression. For Laurie, it was important to me that her packing feels a little more hapless – she didn’t really have the time or the foresight or the energy to pack. Her clothes feel a little bit off, a little bit, try hard. She’s trying to bring the vacation, but it’s just a little bit wrong, and it’s really important to me that she had the wrong nail color, which is something I do in my life every time I get a manicure. I just walk out and I go, “that’s not it. That’s not right.”

Episode 7 finally has a scene where the three friends really open up about their criticisms of each other. What was it like filming that moment?

It was really fun to shoot. And we had been living that dynamic for so long. It’s always fun to get that kind of release, where you get to go at each other in that way. Laurie, she’s so infuriating. She’s insulting under the guise of being a truth-teller, while also lacking self-reflection. And she does not take responsibility for her part, which is really infuriating too, even if she’s right about Kate being a people pleaser or Jaclyn being hungry for and controlled by male attention. Laurie’s really suffering and really lonely, and then it leads to maybe some bad decisions.

Speaking of that, after she sleeps with Aleksei, he asks her for money. What would you say was going through her head at that moment?

It’s so humiliating to think that very likely he’s really just after her for that. And that’s crushing. She had a good time, but it’s really driving home that this whole vacation has been about reflecting on the choices she’s made in her life, especially as they exist relative to her girlfriend’s lives—which, at least on the surface, are much more successful than her own at this point. And to have that bottom is the place where she can maybe finally start to take a look at what her part is in those choices, and maybe take responsibility for some of those choices. Maybe.

She has to make an escape out the window, pulling up her pants as she goes. Did you enjoy that physical comedy?

I love that stuff. I love stunts. It was a minimal stunt, but I did actually get to do it myself. I went out that window like 10 times. Mike was delighted by that scene because we always see a man do this—we always see a man have to scramble out of a bedroom. You rarely see a woman have to scramble out.

Julian’s first day of work had been that pool scene, and he had to sort of work backwards from there. And we did this scene a little bit later, so we had gotten to know each other a little bit. Whenever you’re doing that intimacy stuff, it’s nice to have a relationship. And he was just lovely and easy and warm, and we just had fun.

Are you watching the other storylines as a viewer and enjoying them?

I’m a fan of the show, and I wanted to be able to experience the unfolding of the show in real time with everybody else. And so it’s been fun to see the show, especially some of those gorgeous shots they got out there on the ocean. And it’s wild to think back and remember that those are real places. They’re just extraordinary. It’s an extraordinary country. And I’m sad that the weather has become so extreme, and the plastic is washing up on the shore, and the coral reefs are dying. It’s really stark, the degradation of places like that because of human-created climate catastrophe.

Because of billionaires, some like those characters.

Exactly. It’s going to kill us all. So maybe a little drop of Buddhism for everybody will get us ready for what’s inevitable.

An interview you did with Marc Maron recently went viral because you talked about open-mindedness in your marriage to Tracy Letts, which got misconstrued for you saying that you’re in an open marriage. Anything you want to clear up there?

I mean, when you are in a business we are in, where we don’t work at a bank—we’re not working with the same people for 12 years. We are surrounded all the time by interesting, charismatic people all over the world. And you have to, in your marriage, be able to talk about that in a real way. And that honesty is actually really, not only does it sometimes take the charge out of that kind of moment, because it’s not illicit— but it also just becomes fodder for more interesting conversation about who your partner is. And I just feel that level of radical honesty is actually really stabilizing. That’s kind of the point I wanted to make. And whether you decide to open your marriage up is up to each individual couple. I just know that if some transgression occurred in my marriage, I fully believe that my marriage would not end. It gives me a lot of comfort, and it also gives me a lot of freedom, which I think is healthy.