A Secret, A Security Guard and a Jennifer Coolidge Halloween Party: How ‘The White Lotus’ Assembled Its Sprawling Cast

The cast and crew dish on how the Mike White drama recruited an indie icon, a global pop star, a fan favorite and one well-kept secret.

Published on April 3, 2025

Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey, Patrick Schwarzeneggger, Sarah Catherine Hook and Sam Nivola in The White Lotus

Fabio Lovino/HBO

One day after the 2023 actors strike ended, the casting team behind The White Lotus revealed all of the parts available for season three.

“It was maybe a little foolhardy of us to do it that way because not only is it a show that a lot of people want to be on, it was, from what I understand, one of the first breakdowns to go out and everyone had all this pent-up energy,” recalls casting director Meredith Tucker, who has known creator Mike White since college. “To say it was overwhelming is a bit of an understatement. It’s one of those things where you kind of want to hide under your chair.”

She and her team would spend the next few months pouring over audition tapes. Regardless of one’s prior resume, everyone has to audition for The White Lotus. Once cast, they also make the same amount, which isn’t much for most of them, and are credited not by status but alphabetical order. “This way, you’re getting people who want to do the project for the right reasons,” says producer David Bernad.

Ahead of the April 6 finale, the cast and crew of season 3 reveal how each actor landed in Thailand.

“The Big Blonde Blob”

Image Credit: Fabio Lovino/HBO

The trio, which White took to calling “the big blonde blob,” required that the team find three women who looked enough alike and were conceivably in the same age range. Tucker was deluged with tapes from younger women, but White preferred the idea of women well into their forties. Leslie Bibb, who had longtime partner Sam Rockwell and pal Chris Messina help her with her audition tape (which included the now famous Trump scene), was the first cast, and the trio was then formed around her.

The part of Jaclyn, the actress who’s treating her friends on this getaway, proved trickiest to nail. “It’s a really hard thing to kind of figure out how much of an actor is the actor acting,” says Tucker, who ultimately landed on Michelle Monaghan. At one point, several months into filming, Monaghan and her co-stars, which also included Carrie Coon, found themselves wondering what kind of TV show the Jacklyn character was supposed to star in.

“The night of the Trump scene, we were walking to set in the middle of the night and I turned to Mike and said, ‘What show is she on, by the way? Everyone’s curious,’” recounts Monaghan. “He said, ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. She’s fabulous!’ That’s all I needed.”

The “Soulmates”

Image Credit: Stefano Delia/HBO

Rick Hatchett is a particularly critical role, but it didn’t come together quickly. Woody Harrelson initially signed on, according to multiple sources, but once that fell through, the team pivoted. As the producers and Tucker saw it, it was a quieter, more internal role for Walton Goggins, but they were so convinced that Goggins could pull it off, based on his past body of work, they offered him the role without the otherwise required audition.

The Fallout star was at dinner with his reps when they shared the news. “I walked outside, called my wife and sobbed,” he says. The producers insisted he read all eight episodes before signing on, which he did during a lengthy flight. He not only loved what he read but also found himself bowled over between the similarities between the character’s bleak past and his own.

For the part of Rick’s self-described “soulmate,” Chelsea, Tucker and team were initially focused on women in their mid to late thirties before pivoting to someone younger. The role was also supposed to be an American, which is why Wood submitted her tape with an American accent as well as her native one. Tucker, whose team had loved Wood’s work in Sex Education, and White decided the native version was considerably stronger.

Wood insists she’s typically “very go with the flow,” but says she was anything but about landing the role on her favorite show. That she was told to channel a young Goldie Hawn, a personal favorite of hers, and that the character loved astrology, as she did, made the whole thing that much more appealing. Wood was out at a pub when she learned she landed the part, and, before long, The White Lotus theme song was being blasted overhead to celebrate.

Mr. & Mrs. Ratliff

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Though others auditioned for the Ratliff matriarch, White had his eye on Parker Posey ever since the two ran into each other at Jennifer Coolidge’s famous Halloween party in New Orleans. The theme was Grimm’s Fairy Tales; White was dressed as Hansel, Parker as Cinderella. They chatted briefly. Or, as Posey recounts it, “I was alone at a cheese table at one o’clock in the morning, wondering, ‘Should I have some more cheese?’ Mike was one foot out the door and he’s like, ‘Hi, I just want to say you’re doing such great work lately. Bla bla bla. Bye!’ It struck me: Maybe I’m going to be part of White Lotus. My friends were like, ‘Of course you are.’”

Jason Isaacs was less of a shoo-in, but both Tucker and Bernad were obsessed with his performance in the 2017 black comedy The Death of Stalin, and found themselves eager to have him audition. Isaacs was convinced he’d blown the latter, but clearly he hadn’t. At that point, however, he had yet to actually watch the two previous seasons of The White Lotus, which didn’t stop him from telling White how flattered he was to “be part of the best show on television.” After devouring the scripts for season 3, he went back and binged seasons 1 and 2, and was relieved to learn that he was, in fact, “telling the truth.”

The Rat-liff Pack

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The Ratliff children took longer to cast, according to Tucker. The younger pool wasn’t as well-known, and they needed to all look like a family. Schwarzenegger sent in a tape based off of a one-sentence descriptor of Saxon, the eldest of the Ratliff children, which read something like “a southern finance bro who works for his dad and is a total flirt.” The producers insist that Schwarzeneggar had to “overcome his last name,” which he clearly did – and quickly. In fact, he took the advice of his brother-in-law, actor Chris Pratt, who urged him to make his audition tape memorable, which he accomplished by, in his words, “eye-fucking” the camera.

Meanwhile, Sam Nivola was taken by the quality of the writing. “Even the audition sides were so unbelievably good,” he says, noting that that’s hardly the norm. “So much of the time you’ve got to work with shitty writing and you’re just like, ‘It’s hard work to make it sound good.’” (And yes, his contract included a line or two about some explicit, same-sex scenes, but, he says, “I wasn’t expecting that.”) Sarah Catherine Hook recalls her process dragging on longer than she would have liked, but only because it felt like a dream role from the start. Once she was finally cast, she watched White’s School of Rock with her family to celebrate.

The Love Birds

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Lalisa Manobal, aka Lisa of Blackpink, was eager for a new challenge, and acting seemed like a natural next step for the K-pop performer. Enter The White Lotus, one of her favorite shows, which was holding auditions in her native Thailand. She threw herself on tape and sent it over, which led to a more formal audition in Phuket before White and Bernad. Manobal, admittedly, was nervous. White, admittedly, was skeptical.

“I did not know who Lisa or Blackpink was. All I knew was that there was a Blackpink girl [her bandmate, Jennie] in The Idol and I was like, ‘We’re not doing that.’ Then I found out that there might be security issues and I was just like, ‘No,’” say White, who ultimately reconsidered after seeing her second audition and her local impact. Now, says Manobal, she’d like to do more: “If I have a chance to do more acting, I would love to. There’s nothing coming up, but I’m open!”

As for Tayme Thapthimthong, he was unfamiliar with the HBO drama when the local casting director reached out. “I usually just watch spy thrillers and action films, nothing where you have to sit and really listen,” he says with a laugh. “So, I watched the first season to prepare, and I didn’t really get it. Where’s this going? Is there a bad guy? But three or four episodes in, I realized that it’s all about tension.”

He’d worked with the casting director a decade or so earlier (Mechanic 2), but he’d since left the industry in favor of an army stint and some time in private security. In fact, he was still doing security work when the casting director reached out about the role of Gaitok, who is, in Thapthimthong’s words, “the most useless” of security guards. “She said, ‘I heard you’re out of the army, would you like to get back into acting?’” he recalls. “And it was perfect timing because I really wanted to.”

The Return of Greg (or is it Gary?)

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Jon Gries is a repeat offender at The White Lotus, though he insists he never expected to be invited back the first time, much less the second. “Originally, Mike told me that when he first wrote season one, the body in the bag was going to be mine,” recalls the actor. “But he changed it midstream because he felt like that would be too predictable.”

When White reached via text about season two, he simply asked if Gries was available. He didn’t want to write Greg in, if the actor wasn’t going to be around. “I go, ‘Are you kidding? I’m there.’ He said, ‘OK, It’s going to be Sicily in March. P.S. Greg is diabolical.’ That was it,” says Gries. The season three offer came via text as well. The agreement was simply that they keep it a secret, which everyone involved went to great lengths to ensure happened. In fact, he told everyone he knew that he was going to the Philippines to film a new TV show for a European network. Says Gries now: “I’m using this as a platform to apologize to everybody that I’ve lied to.”

Belinda, Belinda, Belinda

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Natasha Rothwell met White for dinner when he was in town for the 2022 Emmys. The show, along with several cast members, including Rothwell, had been nominated. He’d already told her he was flirting with the idea of bringing Belinda back, but now he was certain of it. Still, he didn’t know where in Asia they’d shoot — at that point, White had his heart set on Japan — but the season would somehow explore spirituality. “I’ll be there,” she told him. A formal announcement was made shortly after, then the writers strike hit and it would be months and months (and months) before any other actors joined her.

Rothwell has a famously collaborative relationship with White, who respects her perspective as both a Black woman and a writer/showrunner herself. In fact, during season one and three, the duo would run through Belinda’s scenes before shooting them and she’d toss out ways to make them feel even more authentic to her experience. “Mike’s a literal genius, so it’s not like me giving him notes on his writing,” she clarifies. “It’s me pitching ideas, and he runs with it.”

The New Girl

Image Credit: Fabio Lovino/HBO

In the early weeks of production, there was another actress playing the part of Chloe. What fairly quickly became apparent, however, was that the actress read too young and appeared too petite, particularly given how much of her screen time was opposite tall actors, including Wood, Nivola and Schwarzenegger. So, Charlotte Le Bon was asked to put herself on tape. She learned her lines on a flight back from Paris, and got to work on her tape once she was home.

“Three or four days later, we were talking about me flying to Thailand,” recounts Le Bon, who had to shoot the “fucking weird” threesome not long after her arrival. The biggest challenge, however, was being such a late arrival on set, since tight bonds had already formed among a cast that had been together for several weeks already. In fact, she acknowledges now, “I was crying a lot that first week.”

The Monologue-ist

Harrelson was also in talks to play this Frank, but then the production schedule shifted and he could no longer make it. Rockwell quickly became the producers’ dream get, and, as they saw it, they had several ins: White had already worked with Rockwell twice — plus, Bibb was his longtime partner and Goggins was one of his closest friends. According to Bernad, however, Rockwell passed at first. “We just didn’t let him,” says the producer. “We were like, ‘Great, so when are you coming?” He ultimately came around.

“To be honest, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to pull this off. I was in the middle of shooting in South Africa on Gore Verbinski’s movie Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die and the monologue was, as you have now seen, a lot,” says Rockwell, who adds: “I pitched Mike some ideas and we read it through and he was on board with the take I had on this guy. We wanted to make him feel possibly ex-military, super masculine and kind of nonchalant, which worked in contrast to Mike’s writing in the scene.”

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