I knew it was over when I received a text from his mom. I thought that while I was having fun in Thailand, my ex-boyfriend—successful and attractive—would be waiting for me back home in Los Angeles. This text told me that, on the contrary, he would rather use his mother as an intermediary than see or speak to me again. Or as his mother said, “I would like to have my coat and shoes and I have some of your belongings to give to you.”
I looked up from my phone at what had become my reality. I was in a villa at the Four Seasons Koh Samui. My traveling companions, Este and Danielle Haim, were performing a trio with Walton Goggins on a karaoke machine. On an angular teak couch, Parker Posey shimmied along to “Young Americans.” The lyrics projected on the flat screen cast an already strange scene in alien-abduction blue.
For the previous week, while the third season of The White Lotus filmed around me, I had lived my own White Lotus. Like the characters on the show, I thought that by traveling more than 8,000 miles across the world I could escape my problems. Like the characters on the show, I learned quickly that just because I wasn’t living my life didn’t mean everyone else had stopped living theirs.
I stumbled outside into the muggy night, past Arnas Fedaravicius, Sam Nivola, and his girlfriend, Iris Apatow—all too young, too beautiful, to be caught dead singing karaoke. Like Jason Isaacs on the show, I doubled over in a heap of flop sweat. For the first time since arriving in Thailand I was confronted with a whiff of reality, and the smell, the smell, was suffocating.
“Unfortunately,” I texted my ex’s mom impulsively, “I am out of town, and unsure when I will be back.”
While I was in truth scheduled to leave Thailand the next day, the contents of this text became quite true. Through the glass walls of the villa, I watched Jason gather the members of his fictional clan to perform a rendition of “We Are Family.” I slipped back inside. While he and Patrick Schwarzenegger belted out the lyrics, my soft voice sang along with them. At that moment I sincerely felt that my place was not in Los Angeles, where I lived, but here—among this traveling group of showpeople.
I was invited to visit the set of The White Lotus by the executive producer David Bernad. Or more accurately, I was invited by Nicole Delaney, who was invited by Este Haim, who was invited by David Bernad, to visit the set of The White Lotus. Normally I would be embarrassed to accept an invitation this convoluted, but David was generous, and I was desperate. Plus, I was part of a long tradition of visitors just fabulous enough to pay for travel but not too fabulous that we were too busy to make the trip.
During my visit, the Four Seasons Koh Samui was inhabited exclusively by the cast and crew of the show. Wires traced the winding roads of the hotel, buggies whizzed by carrying generators, not hotel guests. At first what I was struck by most of all—besides the sweaty beauty of the tropics—was the quiet. If I was expecting the sex and intrigue of The White Lotus, I had forgotten that I was visiting someone’s workplace. I looked down at my suitcase filled with slinky florals and blushed.
Nevertheless, as a woman in her 30s having just gone through a breakup, I held fast to the fantasy of a vacation romance. Like the rest of America, I had heard about the antics of the cast of season two. And so that first day, with the body of a writer and the blaring white skin tone of someone who had just gotten off an airplane, I wandered down to the pool in my sexiest bikini.
There were two single men not working on the set of The White Lotus, and one of them was four years old. I thought I was making progress with the other one when this bachelor—who I would never dream of dating in real life—offered to take a picture of me in my bikini. While he spent most of the time looking at his own abs, he made me laugh. And anyway, vacation standards are different from real-life standards: You do not have to worry what your friends think because your friends are not there.
When he returned to show me his handiwork half an hour later, I was horrified to find he had retouched my freckles, narrowed my nose. “Look how beautiful Lorraine looks!” As my friends gathered to look, I wondered if, in this world of large fluffy towels, there was a towel large and fluffy enough to hide my shame.
As the four-year-old looked from my face to my retouched portrait, it became incredibly apparent that this person I felt I was far too good for was not interested in me at all. That indeed, my dreams of vacation intrigue had been squashed within the first day. He spent the rest of the trip flirting with Danielle, and who could blame him? Not only is she one of the greatest and most beautiful songbirds of our time, but she was also totally disinterested in him.
I first met the cast and crew of The White Lotus at a party at Natasha Rothwell’s villa. They had been working on the show for about a month. As we were getting to know them, they were only really just getting to know one another. Natasha had thrown this party to rectify a very five-star-hotel problem—that while we were all staying at the same hotel, our villas were so private that we never even really got to see one another.
In rapid succession, I was introduced to the characters of this world. I met Natasha first; her arms were open despite the fact that I was a total stranger. The production had given her the best villa in the hotel, with its own full-size infinity pool, sunken outdoor living room, and some half a dozen monkey statues (which I later learned would become a motif on the show). Looking out at the uninterrupted view of the sea, tears came to her eyes. She was living her dream of making great art and got to stay in a room that quite frankly might have been a little much even for a queen. On her days off, Nataha would wade into the infinity pool topless as the sun set, watching the Thai fishing boats with their green lights bob in the sea below. That stopped when one day she was disturbed by a mysterious buzzing sound, only to realize too late that it was one of Mike White’s drones, filming establishing shots for the show. She covered herself and screamed—that was the end of topless swimming for Natasha Rothwell.
Among the swirling faces of actors America would come to know, I spotted someone I was already very familiar with—Patrick Schwarzenegger. In high school, I was best friends with his older sister. I remember Patrick being a surprisingly placid teenager. While the rest of us alternated between having sex in bushes and sobbing, he possessed an adult-like stoicism that made him appear, at least, above it all. I felt pride for Patrick that I would feel toward a family member.
Parker Posey was one of the last to arrive at the party, having just gotten a massage from her favorite masseuse on the property, Banana. For most of the party, she sat inside with the Haim sisters, amid a swirl of girlish laughter and compliments. I had seen my friends starstruck, but never like this. As self-proclaimed indie girls who went to high school in the early 2000s, we worshipped her. And here she was in the flesh—like a walking Koh Samui Zagat guide—telling us where to get the best manicure.
Natasha’s party was one of the few times I actually saw Mike White. During the week, he followed an almost militaristic routine. I learned that he woke each day at dawn and exercised, and kept to a strictly vegan diet. Like a harried parent planning a party for a child, he was terrified that as an outsider I might reveal to his audience something he had worked so hard to keep secret. However, I knew what he had already said in an interview, which was that if the first season of The White Lotus was about class and the second was about sex, this one would be about spirituality.
The next day, Sunday, we were invited on a yacht headed to Pig Island. Pig Island was a magical place where magical pigs swam through magical, crystal clear water. On the way, Danielle, Nicole, Este, and I blasted “Lady Marmalade” on repeat and gyrated in our bikinis. This was a change of
character—we were supposed to be serious girls, not bikini girls. And yet as we passed through the tiny archipelago, I was overcome by an almost transcendent joy—this was the sexiest I would ever be in my whole life. Mike White and the rest of the cast gathered in clusters, as far away as they could be from our desperate, manic energy.
The yacht approached Pig Island. Most of us ventured to shore on a traditional long tail boat. Patrick and his girlfriend, Abby—equally tall, blonde, and beautiful—strapped on life jackets to ride on jet skis. As the long boat sank under all of our weight, Mike White and his cast joked about how sad it would be if we all died. For their part, they were right: Because of their artistic contributions to this show and others, they would be mourned by people they had never met. I, on the other hand, would be remembered as a number: “Cast of The White Lotus and nine others die in fatal shipwreck.” As we approached the shore, I wondered if this made my imaginary death by long tail boat more or less sad.
The boat dumped us on Pig Island, which was filled with tourists—pink-skinned Russians, Americans, and Brits—and swamped by sun and Singha. Pigs scurried along in the sand, eating lemon rinds and rolling around in their own feces. The tables were deemed too dirty to sit on. Pig Island was a pigsty.
One of the most indelible images of the trip was of White and his cast, Este, Danielle, Nicole, and I standing knee-deep in shit, watching Abby and Patrick streaking soundlessly across the horizon on a jet ski. At that moment, I was hit by a sinister combination of jealousy, self-pity, and fear.
I was not the sexiest girl alive. I would never have what Patrick and Abby had. There was a very good chance that I might actually die alone.
Rather than turn their back on my problems, the cast of The White Lotus tried to help. Carrie Coon recommended I read a book about female artists, The Baby on the Fire Escape. Walton encouraged me to talk to his wife, who was both an artist and a mother. Natasha underscored the importance of the “peace palace” she had built—if a new person was to enter her life, he needed to contribute in a meaningful way. Aimee Lou Wood recommended that if I ever did find another boyfriend, he should be either a Libra, Sagittarius, or Leo.
My experience on the set of The White Lotus changed drastically with the arrival of Jon Gries. I would refer to him to his face as Secret Jon, after production reminded us, at least half a dozen times, that his presence on this island, and more specifically the show, was not to be revealed. I was the first to greet Secret Jon in Thailand, his sprinter van having been commandeered to pick me up from a massage parlor on the way back to the Four Seasons. On the show, Secret Jon seems about 15 years older than he is in real life—stiff and potentially murderous. In real life, Secret Jon is aspirationally cool.
From that point on, I had a buddy with whom I could go canoeing and try strange Thai foods. When Jon arrived on the island, his brother had just passed on. At mealtimes, he would tell me stories of being teenagers in recording sessions. How his brother had been one of the best musicians he would ever know. Putting the emphasis on someone else’s loss (permanent and senseless) and off my own (a correct choice of my own volition) was the slap in the face I so desperately needed.
If I was shocked by the care and compassion the cast showed me during my time of need, I shouldn’t have been. My dad is a movie star—I know well the intensity of living on location, the eclectic set of carnies who spend months at a time far away from their friends and family. They work impossibly long hours, often arriving home so tired they cannot even bring themselves to watch television. Even those who do not actually work on the production are united in supporting those unified in reaching a creative goal. It is no wonder that with such single-mindedness, people fall in and out of love, and wars are fought and lost.
When I left Los Angeles I thought I was running away from home. But in fact I was running toward home—to the magical world of movie sets in which I was raised. I recognized my childhood in the craft service table filled with unhealthy snacks, in the cramped clusters of crew members wherever they were allowed to smoke. In these people I saw the kindness of Joy Zapata, my father’s hairstylist, who, much to my father’s chagrin, would do my brother’s hair in fantastical styles just to make us laugh. I saw Chet Badalato, my father’s personal teamster, who let me draw cartoonish images of him, muscles bulging, to break up the monotony of another summer on set.
As the week progressed, I became more and more enmeshed. I helped cofound a White Lotus AA meeting. My traveling companions and I pushed Dave into throwing a karaoke night. And then, when it was time to leave the nest, like a baby bird with a broken wing, I just didn’t. The entire production was leaving the hotel that Friday for its next location, Phuket. My friend Nicole was also leaving—she had a life in Los Angeles to get back to. And yet, I found out from a friend in AA that HBO had rented out the hotel until Monday. And so over Secret Jon’s shockingly good cover of “I Can’t Stand the Rain” and Natasha’s encouragement of “Jon, you’ve been hiding, baby!” I asked Dave if Danielle, Este, and I could stay behind at the hotel. He thought about it for a second, then shrugged: “I don’t see why not.”
For two days and two nights, the three of us were the only guests of the Four Seasons Koh Samui. It was like The Shining in reverse—if I thought the hotel had been eerily quiet before, I now felt like I was my own ghost. While the Thai crew struck the sets, the employees of the Four Seasons finally got to take a break. Every time I turned the corner, bartenders would jam their phones into their pockets. Housekeepers flirted with buggy drivers—their soft laughter the only sound besides the distant hammering of the crew. I moved into Natasha’s old villa—the best on the entire property. I got to have a massage with Banana, who until then had been booked up by the people actually working on the show. I asked one of the beach attendants if he was bummed that the real guests were coming back.
He shrugged.
“It’s all the same to us.”
That first evening, I took off my clothes, even my bikini, and swam laps in what seemed like the more than Olympic-size swimming pool. I sat on one of the pool chairs wrapped in a towel thick, large, and heavy to watch the sun change from pink to inky black. Like the characters on the show, we were due to take the boat to Koh Phangan, to the full moon party, that very night.
My cell phone rang. Danielle and Este explained that they were so sorry, but they actually had to leave. That they couldn’t push their flight after all. They had already canceled the charter that would take us to Koh Phangan, but would I be okay staying here by myself? While my mouth was saying, “No problem,” my body was frozen in the terror of finally, and literally, being alone. I looked out at the sea. The full moon rose. The Thai fishing boats, with their Gatsby green lights, chugged into place. There were major pieces missing from my life—a boyfriend, meaningful career success, children of my own. And yet a voice inside me asked a simple question: Could I be happy with everything I had in this moment, which was everything? The answer, of course, was yes.
For the rest of the trip, I woke every day at dawn, refusing to waste even one minute of my remaining time in Thailand, and more generally, on earth. If I was going to be like a character on The White Lotus, at least I wanted a redeeming arc. Dave invited me, this time personally, to come meet him and his traveling circus on their next stop. I no longer wondered if I was overstaying my welcome. I booked a ticket to Phuket.
Phuket was significantly hotter and crawling with tourists. Jellyfish the size of pizzas would wash up on the beach. We mourned the Four Seasons. We mocked ourselves for mourning the Four Seasons. It turns out that it is hard to live in the atmosphere of The White Lotus and not become the type of person The White Lotus condemns.
Every night at sunset I would join the more aquatically inclined actors and their families for a swim in the sea. I became particularly close to the heart of the crew, whom I jokingly nicknamed the Wives of The White Lotus—Iris Apatow, Emma Hewitt, and Tana Kamine. Since I was free from the obsession of my own interiority, we could go on adventures to winding alleyways full of shops and off-the-beaten-path restaurants, and take boat rides, followed by canoe rides, into bat-infested caves.
In total, I stayed in Thailand with the cast and crew of The White Lotus for three weeks. When I announced to Emma, Parker, and Dave that I was leaving, their hands flew to the sky in despair.
“Why?!” they asked me, and they had a point. I had become so disconnected from my life I didn’t really have anything to go home to—my friends in LA had started new relationships, left old jobs. I knew it was time to go when it became harder to leave than it was to stay. I texted my ex’s mom. I was finally ready to take back whatever detritus—ankle weights, a few tangled G-strings—that I had left with her son. For my last night in Thailand we had a goodbye dinner with so many people they had to give us a table inside. I had been swimming in the ocean until the very last second and was now shivering. As a last act of kindness, Walton walked back to his villa, the closest to the restaurant, to get me a shirt.
I cannot understate the surreality of later watching these same people, in this same place, transform into totally different people on television. I took the long way back to my hotel room, and got lost in the snaking outdoor alleyways between villas. Somehow I ended up back at the restaurant, where outside White was enjoying a private moment by the pool. I hadn’t seen him since Pig Island and now here I was, almost three weeks later, half wet in a bikini, covered in sand.
He turned to me, eyes bulging.
“Are you still here?”
The post Lorraine Nicholson’s Week—Or Three—at The White Lotus appeared first on Vanity Fair.
