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It’s hot. Or, as Mike White, the creator of The White Lotus puts it bluntly, “really f-cking hot.” Not that the 110°F scorch prevents Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of Arnold, from doing push-ups as the crew prepares for another take. As the scene’s cast clambers onto sun loungers by the Four Seasons Koh Samui infinity pool, three burly Thai guys in wide-brimmed straw hats and sodden neck towels wade into the water clutching towering reflectors. The cameras start rolling as Aimee Lou Wood, the English rising star of Sex Education, banters with Schwarzenegger while munching nonchalantly on an apple. A yell of “cut” emerges from a blacked-out poolside cabana, where White is glued to a monitor wearing headphones and a huge grin.

“Can you do that threesome line again?” he shouts. “Really throw it out there.”

Another meticulously carved apple is passed to Wood for continuity. Three takes later and White is satisfied, pumping arms skyward in a mini jig. “I like it,” he mutters. White, one of TV’s most sought-after producers, ambles over to Wood and Schwarzenegger to offer avuncular praise, though his untamed hair, threadbare shorts, and sweat-stained Kauai T-shirt smack more of a perennial drifter who’s wandered up from the beach to sell pot. The crew breaks for lunch, save for Wood, who’s got a stomachache 15 apples in.

Fans of The White Lotus are sure to feel in their guts the more pleasurable pain of interpersonal friction and rising suspense when Season 3 premieres on Feb. 16. HBO’s hit black comedy following the snooty guests and careworn staff in a luxury hotel chain will once again morph into a twisted crucible of nerve-shredding subterfuge. Set in Thailand, after previous seasons in Hawaii and Italy, the latest installment promises to be grander, more epic—and much, much darker. “I do feel like the other seasons were a rehearsal for this one,” says White, perched on a stool between takes at Phuket’s Bangla Muay Thai Stadium during one of two exclusive set visits granted to TIME. “There’s stuff that I’ve never directed before.”

As is the show’s custom, the details of Lotus’ third season have been kept tightly under wraps. The secrecy is part of the fun; characters reveal themselves to us slowly, as dozens of small mysteries and major twists crescendo to the culminating crime. This goes double for Season 3, which stars scene stealers like Carrie Coon, Walton Goggins, and Parker Posey and represents both a vibe shift and an expansion of scope. Surprises abound, as do scammers of various pedigree. Past seasons have opened by flashing forward to the aftermath of a murder that won’t happen until the finale. This season’s white-knuckle prologue suggests a more terrifying escalation looms, and is one of several elaborate action sequences that are enough of a departure that White feels compelled to aver, “I’m not Ridley Scott.”

In 2020, HBO asked White—who writes and directs every episode solo, a rarity in the TV world—to come up with a single-location miniseries that could be produced in compliance with expensive COVID-19 protocols. White sequestered an ensemble at the Four Seasons in Maui for a satire of wealth that also happened to be a murder mystery. It premiered in July 2021 to virtually universal acclaim. Audiences savored White’s scathing dialogue, actor Jennifer Coolidge’s tragicomic performance as the emotionally indigent heiress Tanya McQuoid, and the show’s sly insights into how money comes to shape our every relationship. Its viewership grew by a factor of 3.5 over the course of the season, with 7 million having streamed the premiere by the time the finale aired—a remarkable number for a series without dragons—and it dominated the 2022 Emmys.

Of course, by then it was no longer actually a limited series. HBO had renewed it for a second season just before the first ended. Set in the romantic environs of Sicily and free from the confines of the pandemic, Season 2 allowed White to take his characters off the resort, on excursions that broadened the series’ cinematic setting. Lotus’ sleight of hand is to tantalize viewers with glimpses of luxury attainable only for the wealthiest people, even as it assures us that their guilty consciences and limited worldviews prevent them from enjoying such splendor. Season 2 was nominated for a host of Emmys, and won Coolidge a second trophy.

No one is more surprised than White that this painfully perceptive style, one he’d been honing for two decades, rocketed Lotus into the zeitgeist. “I’m happy that people like this and that I can keep doing it,” he says during a video call in January. But “I don’t feel like I’m ever going to be the kind of writer who is like, ‘I know what people want.’” For him, the show, packed with the kind of uncomfortable conversations that fans can endlessly dissect on social media, reflects his self-described “minor edgelord” sensibility and offers an outlet to make oblique cultural commentary. 

Yet it’s also a personal product of a lifetime’s worth of travel. As much as he appreciates his many adventures, White has observed how a vacation can annihilate the familiar context of a quotidian existence surrounded by friends, family, and the distractions of work. What is meant to be a hard-earned break can devolve into an existential crisis. “If you’re in some place where it’s a different culture, different language, different vibe, and you’re also dealing with heavy personal things,” he says, there are moments when “you feel like, Should I just walk into the water?”

Each morning during the filming process, beginning at 7 a.m., a slew of yachts anchored off the beach for their passengers to gawp at the stars. Some interlopers even made the treacherous journey around the rocky headland that flanks the resort’s half-moon bay to steal onto set. “One lady from Israel walked around three times saying she wanted to be part of the show,” says Four Seasons Koh Samui resort manager Jasjit “JJ” Assi. “One time she hurt herself and was bleeding.”

The underlying comedy of The White Lotus stems from White’s holding a fun-house mirror to rich, entitled Westerners vacationing amid an alien culture from which they’re really detached. White knew he wanted to look to the East to tell the next chapter, though his initial instinct was to set it in Japan, where he’s spent a bunch of time. HBO was hesitant, cognizant of the red tape that swathes the Land of the Rising Sun, and persuaded White to check out Thailand first.

The deal was sealed through delirium. The production team was scouting locations in Thailand’s northern city of Chiang Mai when White was hospitalized with severe bronchitis. “They put me on a nebulizer,” he says, as a troop of extras drift past to find their places for the next take. “I didn’t sleep for like two nights, and by the next morning I was like, ‘I think I have the plot.’ The season is pretty much what happened that night.” The fact that The White Lotus is an anthology means that each season has its own conclusion, “which is always the hardest part,” says White. But after that fever dream, “I felt like I had the ending,” he says. “And so I was like, ‘I guess we’re shooting in Thailand.’”

For White, returning to Thailand also had an element of redemption. In 2009, White and his father Mel were eliminated from the 14th season of reality competition The Amazing Race in Phuket, only to be sequestered in the show’s elimination station on Koh Samui. The irony that both would become the principal filming locations for the latest installment of White’s greatest success isn’t lost on him. “I would’ve hated to have gone through the rest of my life having some bad association with Thailand,” says White.

Goggins says traveling back to Southeast Asia stirred similarly deep feelings. He came to Thailand 18 years ago after tragedy struck his own life. “I sat on these beaches, walked these streets, looking for answers after an existential crisis,” he says, reclining in a poolside cabana enjoying a postwrap Aperol spritz. “I wasn’t prepared for how emotional coming back would be, because I’m playing someone that is looking for the same thing—he is lost, he is angry, and he’s bitter about the hand that life has dealt him.”

Still, White had to find the actual hotel, spending months touring Thailand’s rolling northern highlands, bustling Bangkok, and southern beach resorts of Phuket and Krabi. “It’s fun, but it’s like speed dating,” says executive producer David Bernad, who has worked with White for over 20 years. Koh Samui was one of the final stops on the scouting tour. The resort occupies 43 acres of lush hillside peppered with 60 teak villas, all with pools and sweeping ocean vistas. Another key feature are monkeys; over 140 statues of primates adorn rooftops and gateposts, and much like the Testa di Moro pottery that came to define Season 2, monkeys are the new talisman for the mischief unfolding beneath their treetop perch.

The Four Seasons also boasts 15 private residences owned by “some of the richest people not only in Thailand but globally as well,” says Assi. It’s the ideal setting for a series sending up the callous entitlement of the ultrawealthy. In a country where the mean annual wage stands at $5,450, a four-bedroom residence starts at $8,000 a night. Even amid Thailand’s well-developed tourist industry, the Four Seasons operates on a different plane; rooms at the perfectly comfortable four-star beach resorts nearby start around $60. A parody of obscene decadence couldn’t have a more apt setting.

As soon as cast and crew assembled at the Four Seasons, White called everyone together for a blessing ceremony by local monks at the resort’s spirit house, a traditional shrine outside every Thai building, to honor the ghosts that inhabit the land.

The famously genial atmosphere of White’s sets is one reason why so many top stars wanted to snag a role—though perhaps not the main one. “Normally, when I do auditions, I have to work for hours to try and make the script sound like something I would say. But this sounds natural,” says Sam Nivola, the son of actors Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola, who plays the youngest son of Posey and Jason Isaacs. Goggins expresses similar sentiments: “Here, we work, we live, we eat in the same place. And when you’re not working, that means that somebody else is working. And you get jealous, to be quite honest, because they’re getting an opportunity to say Mike’s words, and you’re not.”

White has had a singular career trajectory. The actor, writer, producer, and later director scripted episodes of the teen dramas Dawson’s Creek and Freaks and Geeks in the late 1990s, before making his art-house bones at age 29 as the writer and star of Chuck & Buck, a black showbiz comedy that premiered at Sundance in 2000 and was honored as the best low-budget feature at the Independent Spirit Awards. (“I knew about Mike before it was cool,” jokes Coon. “I have a Chuck & Buck DVD!”) The early acclaim led to blockbuster screenwriting credits, a filmography that is still growing today and includes School of Rock, The Emoji Movie, and Despicable Me 4. But he also found time to write and direct small films that reflect his warped brand of humanism, beginning with 2007’s Year of the Dog. Between projects, he competed in two seasons of The Amazing Race as well as on Survivor.

White got a taste of cult TV fame in 2011, when HBO unveiled Enlightened, the half-hour dramedy he created with and starred in alongside Laura Dern. The tale of a narcissistic corporate executive (Dern) whose nervous breakdown yields a convenient spiritual awakening, the show positions its protagonist in the morally fraught role of a whistle-blower doing the right thing for selfish reasons. Disciples of Enlightened, which was canceled after just two seasons, should be thrilled to see White’s abiding fascination with Eastern spirituality and wellness practices—and his skepticism of the way they’re instrumentalized by Westerners on self-care kicks—reincarnated in Lotus’ upcoming season. But while Enlightened’s “tone was a little more slice of life and observational,” explains White, “this is more epic, more twisted.”

White, whose father Mel was an evangelical minister when he was growing up, has also dabbled in spiritual pursuits. “I had a Buddhist self-help phase when I had a nervous breakdown in my 30s,” he says. “I use Buddhist concepts as a way to sort of organize my ideas.” Both his relationship to spirituality and confronting his aging parents’ mortality fed into the inspiration for the new season. “It’s been a hard year for me personally,” says White, 54. “My parents are getting older, and there’s a lot of stuff going on at home that’s not fun.”

The show’s most unifying theme, also integral to its Thailand season, is the transactional nature of so many relationships that cross lines of gender, race, culture, and most crucially class, whether between guests and hotel staff or among lovers. In that respect, it fits into a current international vogue for stories, rooted in our polarized global economy, that indict the rich and powerful, from Parasite and Triangle of Sadness to Squid Game and Succession. Because corpses tend to surface in the flash-forwards that open each Lotus season, it also capitalizes on streaming’s recent obsession with whodunits—and has, in turn, created a market for such flimsy leisure-class murder mysteries as Netflix’s The Perfect Couple and Hulu’s Death and Other Details. What set White’s work apart from the pack are his keen insights into human psychology and his ability to help actors translate that understanding into performances that convey the unique mix of desire, delusion, and hypocrisy swirling in each character’s head.

“It has this paradisiacal but surreal feeling,” says White. “Embedded into the show is a little bit of Hotel California—you can check in, but you can never leave.”

Outside Bangla Muay Thai Stadium, two dozen life-size plaster sculptures of tigers with piercing red eyes hang over the cavernous entranceway. These fearsome creatures guard an arena where two muscle-bound pugilists, slick with sweat, trade blows as a ringside crowd of dreadlocked backpackers and chic Eastern Europeans cheer and jeer. Yet not a sound emerges from the baying mob, which has been instructed to pantomime their appreciation noiselessly. On the second floor a video village has been constructed in the stadium’s first-aid clinic, where Bernad and other producers watch monitors amid piles of Hard Rock Café takeout wrappers, mosquito spray, and aspirin bottles.

The subject of their attention is unfolding beyond the ring amid the timber bleachers, where separate elements of Season 3’s cast are converging. There’s Coon, Michelle Monaghan, and Leslie Bibb, as the privileged Americans; Tayme Thapthimthong and Lalisa Manobal, better known as Lisa from K-pop phenomenon Blackpink, as the local Thai hotel staffers; and Arnas Fedaravicius and Julian Kostov, who play members of Thailand’s burgeoning Russian diaspora.

That this season would have a Russian element was something White decided he couldn’t ignore after spending a year in Thailand. In 2023, Russians ranked top for tourist arrivals in Thailand from outside of Asia with 1.4 million visitors, many of them fleeing potential draft into Vladimir Putin’s war of choice in Ukraine. Asked whether the Russian storyline portends a narrative more rooted in world events, White demurs. “There’s as many Russians as there are Thais, it feels!” he jests. “I just felt like there should be some kind of reflection of that.”

Incorporating authentic Thai voices and characters was both a logistical and artistic leap for White. The show employed local producers who painstakingly listened to the Thai dialogue to ensure no one misspoke. The focus on religion and Eastern mysticism is a potential minefield if tackled clumsily. Though White doesn’t flinch from such challenges, seeing them as part of the writer’s art. “I don’t think the show will ever be a nuanced version of a Thai person’s Buddhist experience,” says White. “I don’t feel like I could write that. It is really about Americans coming with preconceptions. You talk to people … and try to build out something that feels multidimensional and you hope it passes the bullsh-t test. Because that’s the nature of storytelling: finding the story, finding the connections between all people—as opposed to seeing the differences and being fearful of that.”

The stakes are also high because of just who that Thai cast includes. Lisa is one of the world’s biggest music stars and among the most followed female K-pop soloists online. Although initially starstruck—a reaction that adds verisimilitude to the pair’s onscreen relationship—Tayme says it didn’t take long for Lisa to break the ice. “The first time I met her at the cast dinner I was really nervous,” he says. “I didn’t even shake her hand. But she was like, ‘Hey, do you want to get a drink?’ And we just hit it off. We both like hip-hop and tequila!”

Tayme, who was born and raised in west London to Thai parents and in everyday life speaks with a plummy Chelsea accent, even found himself a language coach. “My character is an island kid from Samui, so Lisa helped me a lot with phrasing,” says Tayme, who plays a hotel security guard. 

White confesses to early misgivings about casting pop royalty, though he was quickly reassured by Lisa’s professionalism. “Honestly, I was resistant because I don’t think we need more attention on the show,” he says. “But she did a great audition and I think she’s a great actress. I’m really happy we cast her because she’s a real source of pride for the Thai people. It’s almost like she’s a pop star and also Princess Diana!”

Tourism in Thailand, where more than 90% of the population identifies as Buddhist, tends to have a spiritual component, whether that means visiting a temple or embarking upon a meditation retreat. Many of the characters we meet this season are, whether they know it or not, in urgent need of relief from what one of the resort’s holistic health practitioners identifies as “psychic pain.” “They’re all in some kind of hurt,” White says. “Like, they’re all dead, but they don’t know it.”

Those feelings manifest in different, often bleakly hilarious, ways. White says Coon, Monaghan, and Bibb’s trio of 40-something women, who grew up together but have gone on to live very different lives, are mirrors. As they whisper behind one another’s backs and privately fret over their own comparative shortcomings, their relationship illustrates “how you become defensive about the choices of your life, and how those people that are so close to you can be a source of pain to you, even if they’re not even trying to be, just because they chose a different path.”

Jason Isaacs’ finance-titan patriarch and Goggins’ irritable grifter have more in common than is initially apparent, but their self-images are diametric opposites. While the former feels intense pressure to provide for his family, the latter languishes as a result of a lifelong lack of love and encouragement. Goggins’ grim character represents a type of expat White spotted over and over again in Thailand. Guys like this, he says, are “so isolated in their own bubble of scamming, they can’t reach out through normal means of communication.” Traveling alongside these haunted men, whose sordid backstories he’d later Google, he would overhear conversations where “all they can talk about is how they can hide their money from the government.”

These individual spiritual crises are heightened by the Thai resort’s proximity to a natural world—where lizards descend out of nowhere, water churns in the night, and monkeys chatter ceaselessly, evoking the racing thoughts of agitated minds—conspicuously apathetic to the whims of spoiled guests. It’s a backdrop both gorgeous and sinister. So, yes, “because it’s dealing with these existential tropes of facing into the nothingness of self” and “Buddhist themes that have life and death and ethical aspects,” White says, the season “just got more heavy.”

There was also the matter of replacing seemingly irreplaceable cast members, in particular Coolidge, whose departure served as the climax of Season 2. “How do you go about replacing Jennifer?” asks White. “It’s not just the creative part, but she’s a very good friend, and also a big part of the show just as a person. I’m not friends with the cast the way that I’m friends with Jennifer. But there’s definitely some performances I feel rival her as far as hopefully iconic performances.” Posey, with a maximalist portrayal of a pharmaceutical-addled mother oblivious to her family’s dysfunction, has a similar air of privileged suffering. An early episode features the kind of electrifyingly awkward conversation that is Lotus’ trademark, in which Posey inexplicably snubs an old acquaintance.

The scene encapsulates White and his actors’ ability to imbue a single interaction with both levity and dread. As Natasha Rothwell, who played spa manager Belinda in Season 1 and reappears in Thailand for some professional development, sees it, the season at large strikes a balance: “Where you’re talking about spirituality, there’s dark and there’s light. So I think you’ll find that there’s balance throughout the season, but [White] would be doing a disservice to explore spirituality and not speak to the darker undertones.”

Read More: Natasha Rothwell on What to Expect From Her Beloved Character in The White Lotus Season 3

Despite the show’s unsettling themes, the ambience on set was nothing if not convivial. But the experiences of the actors still varied significantly from those in previous seasons. Rothwell saw firsthand how White upgraded his COVID-optimized chamber piece into a lavish international anthology. This time, she enthuses, “it’s expansive. The cast is huge, the scale of the production is huge—and it needs to be to hold the story, because the story is so robust and full and layered and juicy.”

But it wasn’t just the level of investment or breadth of story that felt different. “From what I’ve heard, the second season was a lot more partying,” says Nivola. “It’s honestly so hot here that it’s hard to drink or do anything like that that makes you feel dehydrated.” White wouldn’t know. “I’m thankfully working all the time so that I can’t get into the mischief. I’m sure it’s happening!”

Indeed, the record-breaking heat was unrelenting. “It’s the hottest I’ve ever felt,” says Monaghan. “So we’ve definitely endured a lot.” Outside scenes meant hanging around in the tropical sun for hours, and toward the end of the project a lot of the crew fell ill. Sets were littered with ice coolers and sachets of isotonic powder. “Thank God I got in shape for this,” says White, who went vegan in the run-up to filming.

The indoors brought little respite, since the hum of air-conditioning meant it couldn’t be used while cameras rolled—despite dozens of crew crammed into rooms along with blistering lights. Between takes, the cast would be blasted by hair dryers to remove sweat patches from their clothes, raising their body temperatures even higher. “We’re doing intimate scenes, and you stink,” says Isaacs. “By the end of each day, we’re just caked in sweat and makeup. You can peel your clothes off with a trowel. It melts your fillings. It would be churlish to complain, there are terrible things going on in the world, but we’ve all had enough.”

Still, in contrast to the hardships of filming, the cast were relieved to find the creative process refreshingly collaborative, given White isn’t precious about his words. “He wants actors to be able to show themselves,” says Isaacs. “It’s an odd paradox that he both wrote it all so precisely and is also prepared to throw it all away and give it over to the actors and just stir the pot.”

Often it appears that stirring is what White enjoys most of all. “Mike shrieks with laughter so much that he ruins the take, but you’re thrilled that you get to do it again,” says Isaacs. “Then he sits behind the monitor like some kind of satanic imp, throwing out ever more outrageous lines, things that you’re almost blushing to say, but he just pushes things further and further. And you just trust that in the edit he’ll find the right tone.”

After the bonding experience of the arrival blessing ceremony, the business of filming was more siloed, with most scenes taking place within the separate traveling parties at the hotel. To avoid resetting different locations, the crew shot two weeks of breakfast scenes, followed by two weeks of lunches, two weeks of bedroom drama, two weeks out at sea. It meant that much of the cast were off at any time though still staying on set.

This dynamic led each group to become close, says Isaacs, who plays husband to Posey and father to Schwarzenegger, Nivola, and Sarah Catherine Hook. “I do feel incredibly parental and very, very close to the kids,” he says. “I think it was odd for my real kids to arrive and see how close we were.”

The fact that the actors were all staying in a hotel while playing people staying in that same hotel added to the strange intimacy. Between takes, Nivola lounges on a daybed playing Total War on his handheld console. Isaacs suddenly appears brandishing a tennis racket. “Do you play?” he asks. “I’m really hoping for a game. Mike plays, but he’s just too busy.” After filming one day, as cast and crew troop off to make dinner plans and take much-needed showers, Schwarzenegger wanders down to the beach accompanied by his brother Christopher and mother Maria Shriver, who have just jetted in for a visit.

The camplike atmosphere with work and downtime spent with the same people in the same place meant the distinction between actor and character began to blur. “There’s been times that we’ve been out for dinners and people have said verbatim their lines from the show,” says Wood. “The distance is really disappearing between fiction and reality, because we’re living in the show. It’s so weird. It’s all very meta.”

It’s fair to wonder, at a time when plenty of prestige dramas top out at three or four seasons, how many more times White can conjure up such magic. The series was recently renewed for a fourth season. And its long-term future seems limited neither by audience interest (viewership increased between Seasons 1 and 2) nor, because it resets itself with a new cast, location, and theme each season, by a dearth of fertile material. White already has “some ideas” for what subsequent installments might entail and can imagine making “maybe six seasons.” Why stop there? “Just because I feel like, then I’ll be 60? 59?” And then, he says, with a rueful smile: “And then I’ll probably just die.”