‘The White Lotus’ Leslie Bibb and Carrie Coon on Keeping Up Appearances

[Editor’s note: The following contains some spoilers for Season 3 of The White Lotus.]

Summary

• The HBO series ‘The White Lotus’ is a social satire set at an upscale resort, exploring complexities among guests and staff.
• Each season features a new cast in a different location with a central mystery, with Season 3 set in Thailand.
• Creator Mike White fosters a collaborative environment for actors, allowing room for improvisation and new ideas.

From writer/director Mike White, the eight-episode third season of the HBO series The White Lotus is set at an exclusive Thai resort, where rest, relaxation and pampering are plentiful. Among the guests are childhood friends Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), Kate (Leslie Bibb) and Laurie (Carrie Coon), seemingly on a trip to celebrate each other, and yet their catty keeps showing. Something less friendly keeps bubbling under the surface, and the more time they spend together, it feels like it’s getting ready to boil over at any moment.

During this interview with Collider, Bibb and Coon talked about their real-life shared text thread, how pleased they were to be working with each other, keeping up appearances when it comes to their characters, how White really just got who these women are, that the set is a very collaborative environment, just how little they saw most of the other actors, and which cast member they wish they’d had more time with.

‘The White Lotus’ Michelle Monaghan, Leslie Bibb and Carrie Coon Shared Their Childhoods With Each Other Before Shooting Season 3

“We were just on this great text thread.”

Collider: When did the three of you meet? Did you know each other, at all?

LESLIE BIBB: I saw Carrie do a play a while ago. She was in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I couldn’t tell you who Martha was, which is usually what anybody remembered. I was like, “Who’s Honey?”

CARRIE COON: You’re so sweet.

BIBB: When they said Carrie was gonna do it, I was so excited. And then, we started a text thread with Michelle [Monaghan].

COON: And you guys had a shoe exchange or something in L.A.

BIBB: We had a Valentino exchange of clothes in a parking lot at Bristol Farms. I’d flown in. It was right before we were leaving and we were trying to do fittings before we went, and she said, “Can you just take these clothes to Michelle? She’s gonna try them on at her house before she leaves.” I’d seen Michelle, just in passing, but I had never really met her. We were just on this great text thread. We were sending pictures of each other when we were kids. It was really fun.

COON: It was fun to connect with the past. I forgot we did that.

BIBB: We decided we were from the Midwest.

COON: Normally there would just be one of us in a show, so to have this many women of the same age is such a pleasure.

BIBB: Yeah, it’s really nice.

It sounds like you guys are way more meant to be friends than your characters.

COON: Maybe so.

BIBB: I don’t know. I think they may surprise you.

‘The White Lotus’ Leslie Bibb and Carrie Coon on What Their Characters Really Think of Each Other

“The lie they tell themselves is that they really care.”

Do you feel like they went into this with the best of intentions, or do you feel like they went into this waiting for the others to screw up, so that they could feel better?

COON: I think we’re always waiting for that. For Laurie, it sounds like they’ve had some useful vacations that she found very memorable and that she’s hoping to recreate energetically because her life is not going well. But the thing is, she’s not being upfront with her friends about how her life is really going. There’s a lot of keeping up appearances.

BIBB: But I think that’s true of all of them. They’re all keeping up appearances.

COON: Even when they don’t, they’re hiding.

BIBB: The lie they tell themselves is that they really care. I think they really are concerned. When Kate says, “I really am concerned about this,” we really have some good pleasure when it comes to Jaclyn.

COON: She’s famous.

BIBB: Life is easy for her.

COON: But comparing is the human condition. We’re taught to do it. Women are taught to be separated by it and competitive.

BIBB: It would only be one of us, usually, in a job like this, so for all three of us to get to do this, I was very excited, but also like, “Bibb, don’t drop the ball.” Because they’re such great actors, I knew that I would come out of it better. I remember we were doing this scene, and Carrie was very mad because she finds out something that Jaclyn has done. I feel like my take was a hot mess, but [Carrie’s] was so good. [She was] so mad and she was spinning [her] plate. She was eating breakfast, but she kept spinning her plate, and I was off-camera thinking, “This is so good.” She was just so mad. It was really fun to be in scenes like that and to see these actors that you’ve admired, and to get to play with them. It was inspiring and exciting.

COON: I think Mike really understood Kate. There were many times when you would hear Mike laughing at the monitor. If you were doing a take and you’d hear Mike go, “Ha!,” it meant that he thought something was funny.

BIBB: And he would screw up the take when he did that because he would laugh so loud from the monitor. The worst was if you heard nothing come from the monitor.

COON: But he totally understood Kate and he would cackle.

BIBB: Isn’t it funny how he understands every single character? He also understood Chelsea. I think we’re all facets of him.

COON: Any good writers understand the characters.

BIBB: They’re all some part of him.

It’s rare that one person is writing and directing it all, and then also doing so, season after season. He could just be a dictator demanding a specific vision, but it feels like he’s very collaborative. What was it like to collaborate with him?

BIBB: He leaves room to play.

COON: He’s not precious about the words, though the words are good and you should say them.

BIBB: When it matters, it matters. But if you improvise something, he goes with it. He keeps it very loose.

COON: There’s nothing arbitrary about what he’s looking for. He always knows what it is that he’s after, it’s just how you get there. Because he’s an actor, he understands that everyone’s process is a little bit different. I find that Mike is very responsive to every individual actor’s process and is pretty good at calibrating himself to accommodate whatever that person needs to get to where he needs them to get. It’s frightfully collaborative. He also responds to qualities in people, and then is able to turn that thing up.

BIBB: Or you’ll say something, and then suddenly, he puts it in the show.

COON: Like any good writer, he’s stealing all the things people are saying all the time because he’s always got that part of his brain working. Be careful what you say because you might be saying it on the show.

BIBB: I asked him, “How did you come up with these three women?” And he was like, “Oh, I was at this resort and I saw these three women and I couldn’t tell them apart, except when one of them would get up, the other two would start talking about the other and I was able to discern which one was which.”

COON: And he loved that idea.

BIBB: He lived in Thailand and wrote it all in Thailand for seven months. We were shooting one of the club scenes during the day and he was like, “I lived across the way from this club when I was writing, and it was so loud and had this energy, so I had to write a scene there.” It all flowers the idea for him. He’s extraordinary.

‘The White Lotus’ Leslie Bibb and Carrie Coon Were So Focused on Their Season 3 Trio That They’re Watching Everyone Else’s Storylines As Fans

“I wish the three of us had something with Parker [Posey].”

This is such a big ensemble, and you guys are all in your little bubbles. There are so many people you don’t get to work with much or at all. Who do you think your characters would have had more fun with, if they just left their friends?

BIBB: I wish we all had something together. I wish the three of us had something with Parker [Posey]. We had a slight thing with her.

COON: That was a hoot to watch.

BIBB: I feel like that would have been great.

COON: I really do feel like everyone belongs where they are. I just feel like we would mar whatever we would be inserting ourselves into. But it is wild how little we saw the other people.

BIBB: You read the scripts, and then they’re very protective of the scripts, so we were able to just have our stories. There’s a part of me that can’t really remember what happened with everyone else.

COON: I kept a really light touch on that other stuff because I want to be able to experience it as a fan. It’s nice that we can because we didn’t really act in scenes with them and I don’t really remember what happens to them. It’s a nice way to do it.

BIBB: And we shouldn’t know what’s happening because we wouldn’t.

The White Lotus airs on HBO and is available to stream on Max. Check out the Season 3 trailer: