‘The White Lotus’: Jason Isaacs on His Character’s Fate in the Finale

“Storytelling is magic,” Jason Isaacs said. “It’s sleight of hand, it’s delivering a surprise ending that people don’t see coming.”

Isaacs, 61, best known for playing villains in “The Patriot,” “Peter Pan” and the Harry Potter films, was speaking via video call a few days before “The White Lotus” Season 3 finale. A keen amateur magician, he had already performed a couple of onscreen card tricks. His work on “The White Lotus” is also a kind of conjuration.

He plays Tim Ratliff, a Durham, North Carolina financier. Tim’s blood runs blue, as do the letters on his Duke T-shirt. (Duke is reportedly upset at the association.) Confronted with past malfeasance and facing the loss of all he has inherited and worked for, Tim spends his Thai vacation overdosing on his wife’s benzos and contemplating murder-suicide. That he can make Tim engaging even in the sweaty maelstrom of an entirely internal crisis speaks to his actorly gifts.

Not least among them is a way with misdirection. (Spoilers start now.) In Sunday’s season finale, Tim sets out to poison his family with a fatal batch of piña coladas only to change his mind a sip or two in. (Even his youngest son, Lochlan, played by Sam Nivola, who later took a dose via a protein shake, was spared.) Though Tim had spent the whole of the season running from his fate, he ultimately accepted it and trusted that his family would accept it, too. So that’s a nice surprise.

Isaacs, of course, knew this from the start. “I read all the scripts,” he said. But watching the finale with his castmates on Sunday, he felt strangely moved. “We were all of us holding each other’s hands and watching and crying our eyes out in a rather embarrassing way,” he said.