Jason Isaacs relives filming ‘The White Lotus' piña colada scene: ‘It was one of the reasons I was worried about taking the job'

Yahoo

3 days ago

Jason Isaacs is used to Harry Potter fans giving him a sock (Dobby is free!). After starring in Season 3 of The White Lotus as scandal-hiding financier Timothy Ratliff, however, he's experiencing a new phenomenon: "People offer me piña coladas everywhere I go," the actor tells Gold Derby. "I was on the Tennis Channel [last month], because I'm a tennis buff and I was talking about tennis, and they brought out a smoothie — a blender with piña coladas in it."
That homage to his desperate patriarch's shocking, and thankfully aborted, plan to kill himself and members of his family with a poisoned cocktail isn't the only reminder of his time on one of 2025's buzziest series: After Duke University publicly objected to North Carolina native Timothy donning his alma mater's T-shirt during his deadly visions, Isaacs now has a collection of Blue Devils apparel. "I've got the T-shirt, and I wore it just two days ago. I wore it to play tennis," he says. "Whoever the idiot was who bothered to complain about it, I hope it gets to them and annoys them every single time. I have many friends who went to Duke, and I keep meeting them every day. People can't wait to tell me they went to Duke and enjoy the fact that, for some reason, some person or some people at Duke decided to make a fuss about the most ludicrous thing in the world."
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Isaacs took the role of distraught dad very seriously. He auditioned for the first time in decades, nervously walking past a Times Square billboard of himself as Cary Grant in the 2023 BritBox series Archie on his way to read an elongated version of the Ratliffs' first meeting of their wellness guru Pam. Once cast, he worked with dialect coach Liz Himelstein and watched archival footage of Durham politicians to perfect an accent befitting a Southern mogul who'd want to sound like his grandfather, a former governor of North Carolina. He asked his psychiatrist brother how someone popping his wife's lorazepam all day long would behave — then realized he'd have to imagine that Timothy, who's never before had a problem he couldn't solve with money or connections, is the one person for whom the anti-anxiety medication doesn't work.
"It might slow his body down, but it doesn't slow his mind down. The abyss is opening up," Isaacs says, rattling off Timothy's concerns from the trivial (what will the boys at the golf club think when he's arrested?) to the dire (who would loan his family money when they lose everything? What will prison be like?). "There is no way back from it, but his brain can't stop then playing out what's going to happen, the different scenarios," he continues. "So I needed to have my mind firing on a billion pinball cylinders in every direction."
Keeping Timothy's internal thoughts ricocheting turned out to be the key to assuaging Isaacs' own anxiety that his performance could veer toward "the extra from Cheech & Chong."
"I didn't ask for more words or anything. I just went, 'I'm worried about being arguably the most boring person that's ever been in White Lotus,'' Isaacs recalls of his initial conversation with creator Mike White.
Fabio Lovino/HBO
Together, they made sure the audience could see Timothy's wheels turning. "This is a tribute to Mike, not to me: The really great stuff that happens on screen is when you're watching a character and they're saying or doing one thing — I don't get to say very much — and they actually mean something else. They're hiding something from everyone around them, but they're driven by a third thing that we, the audience, understand about them, but they don't understand about themselves," Isaacs says. "That only happens with great writing and great direction, and then if you're surrounded by great people, and I think that happened a lot in White Lotus."
His appreciation for the show grew even more when members of the cast attended a screening of the season finale. He witnessed the audience's reaction to the scene in which Timothy's daughter, Piper (), whom he'd assumed could survive without their wealth, returns from her overnight stay at the monastery and admits to her parents that she needs the finer things in life. Timothy's relieved wife, Victoria (), hugs Piper and gives him a thumbs up, not knowing that Tim now feels forced to add his daughter to his murder-suicide plot.
"The camera pans to me, and I remember how sad it felt [filming Tim's realization], and the audience pissed themselves laughing. Everybody falls out of their seat when they see Tim is thinking, oh god, she's on the list as well. I'm like, 'What's the matter with you people?!' And I realized that's the genius of Mike White. It's all those things at the same time. I had to be heartbroken for them to have a laugh," Isaacs says. "It was a joy watching [the finale] with an audience. I wish I'd seen all of it with an audience."
Here, the actor shares more about how he navigated Timothy's unraveling, why filming the piña colada scene scared him, and what it's really like to work with White.
Gold Derby: You've said the most challenging part of playing Timothy Ratliff wasn't the accent; it was calibrating where he was in his lorazepam spiral from scene to scene when you were filming out of sequence. What was the wildest day?
Jason Isaacs: Every day. I walk through a door from Episode 8 in February, and I'd walk out the other side in August. Or you'd be shooting scenes back to back: This is from Episode 3, and now the next scene is from Episode 7, and now this is from Episode 6. And where in the episode? Have I taken six pills that day or no pills? I've just spoken to the lawyer, so I can't be horribly inarticulate and slurring. Or no, this is the scene after I can't stand up. The technical challenge of how out of my head am I is one thing, because this is out of sequence. But also, how do I get to that place where I'm suicidal or I want to kill my family?
The thing about acting is you really have to believe it. If I don't believe it, the audience doesn't believe it. Other people [in the cast] are having more fun things. Like the three girls who have those conversations that we've all had — that gossipy stuff is very realistic and close to everyone's experience. I had to be on the edge of my entire existence, like everything that I have is stripped away. And I know it's a stupid thing to say, but I'm not pretending. I'm trying to be it as much as possible, because that's what the camera picks up. You can't really lie to a camera. There's a level of pretending: you're not dying, and when you punch people in the face you're missing and stuff. But mostly, when [actors] are crying, they're sad. When people are shouting, they're angry. I mean, that's what acting is. So it was a much bigger challenge, yes, to do it out of sequence, but to be Tim and to love my family enough to think they would be better off if I killed them, to be in that disturbed a state of mind. … There aren't many new things left for me as an actor. That was new and horrible.
Mike didn't give you a heads-up about where Timothy's arc was headed. He let you binge the scripts after you were cast and experience it for yourself. What was your reaction when you first read the piña colada scene?
It was one of the reasons I was worried about taking the job. People killing their whole families happens. It's heartbreaking. It's often someone who's been through a horrible divorce, so it's out of spite that the other person couldn't get the kids. But for the reason that Mike's created… This is different. This is a Greek tragedy. And as an actor, you relish and are excited by big acting required, you know. I spent many episodes worried that I would be the boring stoned person in the corner and the audience wouldn't be on the journey with me. But I knew something very, very dramatic was coming, and I knew I had to believe it. If I don't believe that I want to kill everybody I love for their sake, the audience is not gonna believe it, and I just didn't know how to get there. I don't plan things. It's not like I go, "Oh, my voice will crack there," or "I'll turn there and shout." I didn't know what I was going to do. … "The coconut milk is off." Was it a line that was improvised? Quite a lot of stuff was improvised that day because Mike just gave me space to do whatever. And I just remember thinking, I hope it comes. Is the Muse female? Is that misogynist? I don't know. I hope She arrives. I wanted to be as good as the writing deserved, and as good as the show deserves.
I've done big, dramatic things before, but they're always scary. They should be scary. There are actors [who] arrive and they've planned a performance: They were so good in front of their bathroom mirror the night before or with their acting coach on Zoom, and they get there [to set] and they just repeat it. To me, it's what Peter Brook, the great theater director, called "dead theater." There's nothing happening that's alive in the moment. So it's always a bit scary to be alive at the moment.
SEE Patrick Schwarzenegger on pulling off Saxon's transformation in The White Lotus Season 3
Let's talk about the significance of the hymn "Lo, How a Rose E're Blooming." In Episode 5, Timothy sings it when he's talking to Piper about having been an altar boy when he was young. He seems to have a second of peace. And then the song comes back in the finale, playing in the background as the Ratliffs sail back to reality and Timothy admits to his family that things are about to change for them. What do you remember about filming those scenes?
[In Episode 5], the drugs are really kicking in. He's remembering a time when life was simple, before he married someone who's obsessed with status, before he had to maintain his status, before the obligation on him to make himself powerful and rich and to stay more powerful and rich than other people. Just the sweetness of that. And he gets back to that at the end [when he accepts that he's going to lose everything]. So it's a kind of beautiful bookend quality.
In fact, when he drifts off [singing in Episode 5], I had to re-dub that because I was muttering it to myself on the day, because I knew it was supposed to go into that [choir-sung] song at that point in the scene. And then when they decided not to do that, they said, "Can you sing it more clearly?" I went into the studio, but my mouth doesn't really move [in the scene we'd shot]. So it was quite technical. I had to sing it enough that you would remember the song by the end of the [season].
That's a really crucial moment to have to re-dub.
I didn't want to do it. [Laughs] The thing about dubbing is... I'm good at it technically, because I do lots of voiceovers, and documentary voiceovers, and animation stuff. But when you're doing a scene, you want something from the other people, or even in a moment like that, I'm lost in my memory of myself as a child. When you go in and re-dub, you're not looking at the other people; you're looking at yourself and your own lips.
that Mike likes to shout out suggestions to actors on set. What is that like?
He shrieks. He kind of has this fantastic laugh, this kind of demonic cackle, often when you're doing something really serious that he finds hilarious. And then he just shouts out. … The other thing with Mike is he doesn't get credit for being the director that he is. He gets plenty of credit; that show's a huge success. But people talk about him as the writer. If anybody else directed it, it would never be as rich because of those things, because of the way he shouts out and because of the way he gives you notes as well. His suggestions are so gently offered up they're like soap bubbles. They burst if you look at them too closely.
He does a weird thing, like if you're old enough to remember Peter Falk's Columbo: Columbo always used to leave the suspect in the end. He'd be on his way out the door, and he'd turn around and go, "Just one more thing." Mike would walk around and come back and go, "Is there a world… no, that's a dumb idea." And then he throws some suggestion at you as if he'd half thought of it, and then he'd start to give you a line reading that, if you just dismissed it and ran in some other direction, you're a moron, because he's a brilliant actor and the line readings were fantastic.
If you ask me what the specific things were, I probably shouldn't tell you anyway, because what it ended up with was exactly what it needed to be. It's like every episode was an hour and a half, and then we cut to an hour. Everybody lost stuff that they loved, but it ends up as the perfection that it was.
Mike also likes to shoot scenes with different tones so he has options when he sees how storylines are playing next to each other in an edit. Was that amount of variety new to you?
I've never done that before in this way at all. One of the things I think I get hired for — I mean, all actors think this — is my choices, my decisions, and particularly no one else is as in charge of, "Listen, I remember what mood I was in in February when I walked through that door. I can get myself back there for when I walk through it in a set in Bangkok in August meant to be my bedroom." But with Mike, he goes, "Can you do more funny?" "Can you do one slower?" "Can you do one faster?" "Can you do one where you don't care?" Normally, I wouldn't be rude and say no, but you go, "This is my bit." But with him, a) because he's so brilliant, he could play every part better than anybody you cast, including the women, and b) because he's, in the end, going to be putting this piece together with so many different spinning plates, you go, "Yeah, OK, fine. You crawl into my head with me and be part of the creative decision-making process." You don't normally let directors do that because they've got too many other things to think about, and that's why they hired you, because you know your stuff. So, yeah, I would play scenes less bothered by things, more bothered by things, more wasted, less wasted, finding it amusing, finding it tragic. I'd give him whatever he needs.
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