Jason Isaacs cannot stop talking about the 'White Lotus' cast's off-screen drama

Yahoo

11-04-2025

Season 3 of The White Lotus may have ended, but rumors are continuing to circulate around the show's stars. Actor Jason Isaacs, who played Timothy Ratliff — a fraudster, Duke University alum and patriarch of the affluent Ratliff family — has seized many opportunities to dish on the cast's dynamics behind the scenes. Isaacs's latest comments regarding offscreen tension among the White Lotus cast came this week, when the actor attempted to clarify previous remarks about there being bad blood among castmates on the show.
'And like anywhere you go for the summer, there's friendships, there's romances, there's arguments, there's cliques that form and break and reform and stuff like that,' he said on the April 9 episode of The Happy Hour on SiriusXM's Today Show Radio. 'And I'm just saying it wasn't a holiday, and partly I started saying that because people think we were on a seven-month holiday and believe me, it felt like work a lot of the time. It was insanely hot and there's all the normal social tensions you get anywhere, but for all of you [who] think you've cracked it by something you think someone has posted or is in a photo or not, you're just so far from the truth, believe me.'
Here's a look back at some of Isaacs's most telling interviews about the White Lotus cast, from Season 3's February 2025 premiere to now.
While filming Season 3 in Thailand, Isaacs told the Guardian that there was 'bacchanalian behaviour' happening after hours. He didn't specify whether it was the cast or crew, or both cast and crew, engaging in this behavior.
'People are away from home and, you know, there's a lot of bacchanalian behaviour going on. I'm not telling stories out of school. It's just grownups doing whatever we like. Thailand is a place full of parties, and we are not immune.'
Isaacs also likened filming Season 3 of the HBO series to 'an open prison camp.'
'It was a theatre camp, but to some extent an open prison camp: you couldn't avoid one another,' he said. '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. There were alliances that formed and broke, romances that formed and broke, friendships that formed and broke.'
Isaacs also told Sharp Magazine that filming The White Lotus was 'a cross between high school and Lord of the Flies.'
'There was a pressure cooker atmosphere, not just to the story we were telling, but to our own lives,' he said. 'People are away from home. It's hot, people are drinking wine at night. There's an offscreen White Lotus as much as an onscreen White Lotus — just with slightly fewer body bags — to navigate and to add to the intensity of the whole experience, which is not something I'm used to. Normally, you go home.'
In an effort to dodge questions surrounding whether or not a prosthetic was used for Isaacs's full-frontal scene in Episode 4 of The White Lotus, the actor spoke about what he described as the 'double standard' that exists for men. Creator Mike White has since confirmed that Isaacs used a prosthetic for that scene.
'Because the Best Actress this year was Mikey Madison at the Oscars, and I don't see anybody discussing her vulva, which is on [screen] all the time,' Isaacs said during a taping of CBS Mornings. 'I think it's interesting that there's a double standard for men ... Margaret Qualley as well, in The Substance — nobody would dream of talking to her about her genitalia or her nipples or any of those things. And so it's odd there's a double standard.'
Days after calling out the 'double standard' for men who choose to go nude, the White Lotus actor clarified his comments. Isaacs told Variety that he had tried to address questions about his full-frontal scene by either attempting to 'brush it away' or answering 'lightheartedly.'
'I said the wrong words in the wrong way. I used the phrase 'double standard,' which I didn't mean at all. There is a [different] double standard — women have been monstrously exploited and men haven't,' he said.
'I absolutely should not have mentioned those two actresses, whom I respect enormously,' he added. 'Mikey Madison I'm a massive fan of. My point wasn't that men have had a harder time than women — that would be absurd. Women have had a monstrous time on camera forever, and I hope to God that is changing.'
While chatting with Vulture, Isaacs reiterated similar sentiments from his February cover story with Sharp Magazine, in which he described filming the HBO series as being a cross between high school and Lord of the Flies. Isaacs teased that there's 'an off-screen White Lotus' with 'fewer deaths but just as much drama.'
'Some people got very close, there were friendships that were made and friendships that were lost,' he told Vulture. 'All the things you would imagine with a group of people unanchored from their home lives on the other side of the world, in the intense pressure cooker of the working environment with eye-melting heat and insects and late nights.'
Isaacs declined to elaborate on the drama that occurred off camera.
'Absolutely not,' he said. 'I became very close to some people and less close to others, but we still all had that experience together and there's a certain level of discretion required.'
Isaacs touched on the full-frontal scene once again while talking with the Hollywood Reporter. Gushing about creator White's 'genius' and the 'twisted, marvelous world he makes up,' Isaacs said that he was tuned in with online chatter and the 'prurient talk about a nude shot.'
'The series is much more profound and rich and resonant and human than others, but Mike's genius is also that he knows how to titillate and provoke and create conversations. He uses the medium of hourlong television at a weekly interval utterly perfectly. It's why the internet is full of talk of Timothy Ratliff going full-frontal,' he said.
While reflecting on his character Timothy Ratliff's story arc over the course of the season, Isaacs also spoke to Deadline about having to be 'a little bit more careful' than he normally would while speaking to the press about The White Lotus. He referred to the backlash he received following his full-frontal comments on CBS Mornings.
'Then I bothered to issue some statements, I said the things I said were misinterpreted, and it was extraordinary how a fuss developed, not over a genuine backlash, but over the desire to amplify five people writing something on the phone while they were doing who knows what, probably having sandwiches, sitting on the toilet. That's been interesting. I'm totally fine with the things I've said and done, but it does make you far more self-conscious, because I like to just chat,' he said.
Isaacs doubled down on his previous statements that filming Season 3 of The White Lotus wasn't an entirely positive experience. Without naming names, he told the New York Times that the idea the cast was 'one great big' family was false.
'We were sticking pigs every day. No, but it wasn't entirely blissful,' he said. 'Obviously people formed friendships, but we weren't one great big homogenous happy family. It was a large group of people away from home, unanchored from their normal lives. I'm not going to break ranks and say who did what to whom, but it certainly wasn't a holiday.'