From constipated security guard to drug-addled hotel manager: White Lotus's 40 best and worst characters

The Guardian

09-04-2025

Warning: this article contains spoilers.
Three seasons of The White Lotus are now complete, which means that Mike White has offered us some incredible main characters over the years – and some not so great ones. How do the newest batch stack up against the veterans? Let's rank the lot and find out.
What's bizarre about Mook isn't that, as Gaitok's would-be love interest, she basically only functioned as a not-always-sympathetic ear. No, it's that she was played by Lisa from K-pop supergroup Blackpink, who is legitimately one of the most famous women in the world. It's like hiring Lady Gaga and using her as an extra.
Tanya's assistant in the second season was a two-dimensional representation of Gen-Z. She hated work. She had terrible fashion sense and even worse taste in men. That's about it.
Jim Hollinger was the man who Rick spent the entire season tracking down. However, when he was found, he simply turned up in that episode and growled, and then turned up in another episode and died. The show heralded his final scene with great portent (the screaming monkey!) but that doesn't cover for his lack of things to do.
Has there ever been a television character as constipated as Gaitok? The hotel security guard did little more than stare on paralysed instead of doing his job. What a frustrating man.
Want to know how low stakes season one of The White Lotus was? One of the main characters was a fundamentally decent man, rather than a leering caricature of consumer culture. Boring! Next!
Mark's wife did have a little more to do, but not much. As a CEO who struggles to let go of the stress of her everyday life when she arrives at the resort, she felt like a crayon sketch of future characters who'd be better defined.
Piper, no! The least memorable of the Ratliff siblings (largely because she didn't commit incest onscreen) Piper's arc was a bit of a damp squib. She wanted to become a Buddhist, tried Buddhism, didn't like it because of the lack of air conditioning, and then went home.
A cross between Mook and Portia, Olivia was a snarky teen who didn't meaningfully contribute to the wider story. Also, she was played by Sweeney, an actor capable of much more than this.
Season two arrived as the Michael Imperioli Season of The White Lotus. After all, if White was going to hire an actor of this pedigree, he must have written something meaty for him. In the end, though, he got one orgy scene and then nothing else.
Let's look at this positively. Isaacs got a free luxury holiday, $40,000 an episode and – after his mid-season full-frontal shot – a weird little press cycle about penises in return for basically being catatonic for several hours at a time. He's had harder jobs, I'm sure.
By this point, The White Lotus has a clutch of favourite archetypes. Albie fell into the 'sensitive young man on the cusp of embracing his sexuality' camp and, unfortunately, was the weakest of the lot.
After Armond , there was hope that the next member of White Lotus staff depicted onscreen would be given something of comparable juiciness. Instead, Valentina tutted at her employees and her main highlight was comparing Jennifer Coolidge to Peppa Pig.
Another White Lotus go-to archetype is the obnoxious, entitled bro. Cameron hit all the marks he was required to but, compared with his analogues in other seasons, was unsatisfyingly obnoxious and entitled.
Shannon is such an onscreen force that she's reliably memorable in almost every role. However, her part in The White Lotus – as an annoying mother-in-law designed to torment Rachel – was one of the more forgettable characters of her season.
Season three's 'blonde blob' (as nicknamed by White) – a trio of superficially nice but secretly mean women – were all much of a muchness. Jaclyn got plenty to do on the show (her disgust at being squirted with water pistols by local kids was a masterpiece) but she was the least likable out of the three.
Similarly, Kate had her moments – her pyjama-clad eagerness to get the blob's Big Night Out wrapped up in time for bed was hilarious – but it still felt a little like her main job was to just react to her more interesting friends.
The hotel co-owner in season three, Sritala drifted in and out of the action, but made her presence known whenever needed. That said, she's only this far up thanks to the show's decision to use that incredible clip of Mejudhon singing the traditional Thai song Lam Tad on a 1992 TV show as part of the plot.
First and foremost an accomplice to Lucia (who was a better character), Mia gets points for elevating her potentially thankless sex work plot with her desire to sing for a living.
A character who started out as Olivia's snarky sidekick, Paula ended up as a fairly integral part of season one. Her discovery that the hotel had been wrongly built on native land went a long way to underscore the show's jaundiced view of western tourism.
Rachel was a sweet and ambitious woman who had just got married to the world's biggest jerk. Her slow burn realisation that the rest of her life was going to be awful forms a huge part of the first season.
What a weird arc Lochlan had this year. He stared longingly at his brother while Saxon went into the bathroom to masturbate, then he masturbated his brother, then he was poisoned. Extra marks for his beautifully shot near-death scene. Extra extra points for seducing women via the medium of closeup magic.
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The only distinguishable member of the blonde blob, on the basis that she was actually able to articulate her sadness rather than frantically gloss over it.
For a while it looked like all Plaza would get to do on The White Lotus was roll her eyes at her husband. But then her character slept with Theo James. Or maybe she didn't. Has any actor managed to play both possibilities with such total conviction?
Woodall can neatly divide his life into the bit before The White Lotus and the bit afterwards. And this is all thanks to Jack, a secretive and magnetically sexy Essex man who seduced Portia, then his 'uncle', then the world.
Cameron Sullivan walked so that Saxon Ratliff could run. Preening, obnoxious and obsessed with sex and smoothies, Saxon started the season as an unbearable bro. But thanks to a combination of drugs, incest and a Pema Chödrön book, he came out of it a changed man. A bit? Maybe?
The only character to appear in all three White Lotus seasons, Greg/Gary started out as Tanya's meek and apparently terminally ill love interest, and ended as an all-powerful, obscenely wealthy villain with a weird sex thing. Will this be the last we see of him? Hopefully not.
On paper, Bert didn't have all that much to do during season two. But whatever he was given, he wrung every last drop out of it. Ruder and more sexually forward than most 80-year-olds, Bert blazed a trail through every scene.
Harper's husband, Ethan spent his time on the show experiencing various levels of doubt and paranoia as he watched his wife and best friend flirt in front of him, which Sharpe portrayed with aplomb.
At times Rick felt as if he was shipped in from another, slightly more generic show. His hard-boiled quest for revenge at times felt a bit too straightforward for The White Lotus. However, it was rewarded with a killer death scene and an all-timer reaction meme. But we'll get to that in a second.
Daphne earns her high spot thanks to her storyline's extraordinary climax. Ethan tells her that he thinks their spouses had sex. She responds with a mind-blowing silent 25-second reaction shot where wave after wave of emotions pass across her face, then probably has sex with Ethan in retaliation. A star-making performance.
Anyway, about that meme. Rockwell's uncredited appearance was a breath of fresh air in an often turgid season. He drank. He did kung fu. He embarked on a berserk monologue about how he wished he was an Asian girl who could have sex with himself, while Rick boggled at him. Amazing.
In a show full of entitled idiots, Shane Patton was by far the most entitled. A man so petty, whingy and obnoxious that he actually ended up murdering a hotel manager.
Poor Chelsea. All season long she worried that bad things come in threes. Who knew that the third thing would be her being accidentally shot in the chest after watching her boyfriend kill his dad. The smart money is on Wood being this year's Woodall, a breakout star with an enormous future ahead of her.
The beating heart of season one. He was a sensitive, awkward boy whose family went to Hawaii and argued a lot. He ended up staying there, achieving the greatest honour that The White Lotus can award: transcending tourism and integrating with the local people.
In season one she was a hotel worker whose heart was broken when a guest befriended her and then left her in the lurch. In season three she returned as half-guest-half-worker who befriended a member of staff and then left him in the lurch. Now she is a millionaire, so God knows who'll she'll leave in the lurch in season four.
A prostitute who electrified every scene she was in, Lucia ran riot through the corridors of the hotel, gleefully ripping off guests left and right as she went. In any other show she'd be a villain. But this is The White Lotus, and everyone is terrible, so she somehow emerged a folk hero.
Hollander is uniformly great in everything. However, he was especially great in the second season of The White Lotus as Quentin, a mysterious British man with intangibly nefarious intent. In a way it's sad that he died; The White Lotus could have quite happily become The Quentin Show and nobody would have minded.
Piper, no! Again! Letting Posey loose on a southern accent with dialogue that required her to massacre words like 'Buddhism', 'guru' and 'tsunami' was, in retrospect, a masterstroke. Officially Victoria is now broke. But if White can't find a way to drag her back to a luxury hotel for season four, it'll be a tragedy.
Armond is the reason why we started talking about The White Lotus in the first place. The entire first season was structured and paced around his transition from pin-sharp hotel manager to gibbering, drug-addled lunatic. Armond also had the best death of the series – visibly defecating in a suitcase and then getting stabbed. He will be forever missed.
Could it be anyone else? In Coolidge's hands, Tanya – rich and lost and self-absorbed – became one of the all-time great television characters. Her appearance in the first season gave the show a sad, sweet note. But in the second she was the centre of gravity, forcing the action to orbit around her whims. She was a great character, who had an amazing death. Thank God for Coolidge, thank God for Tanya and boo to everyone who tried to murder her.