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    Jake Lacy Says Aloha to ‘The White Lotus’

    In an interview, the actor discusses the HBO social satire, Sunday’s season finale and the possibility of his returning for Season 2.This interview includes spoilers for Sunday’s season finale of “The White Lotus.”Before Jake Lacy landed in Hawaii to shoot “The White Lotus,” he had only received the first script of what was at the time a six-episode limited series. (HBO recently renewed it for a second season.) He knew a character had died — a cardboard coffin of human remains was loaded onto a plane. But who was it?“Mike White [the show’s creator, writer and director] was like, ‘All these limited series start with a body,’” Lacy said. “So there’s an element of narrative satire along with the social satire. It’s like, If a dead body is what you want, then we’ll start with a dead body. We’re making fun of the device that is part of this very popular narrative format.”“The White Lotus” doesn’t deal with its opening mystery right away, and only gives us a few clues at first. Before a backward time jump to a week’s events at a Hawaiian luxury resort called the White Lotus, we see that Lacy’s character, Shane, seems disturbed both by the dead body and by a friendly question put to him regarding the whereabouts of his wife Rachel, (played by Alexandra Daddario). Hmmm.“I kept asking myself, ‘When do I kill my wife?’” Lacy said. He assumed he was the killer, and she would be his victim. From the character’s perspective, the couple’s honeymoon had gone off the rails the minute they failed to get the prized Pineapple Suite they booked, and the hotel manager Armond (Murray Bartlett) put them in the Palm Suite (no plunge pool, but a nicer view) instead. Things soured further thanks to Shane’s temper tantrums and Armond’s odd responses to them.“Either one could back down,” Lacy said, “but they both keep upping the ante.”The actor recalls reaching the last pages of the final script — the scene in which Armond slips into Shane’s room to leave a parting gift in his suitcase — and pumping his fists with glee. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is it!’ How did I not see this coming four episodes ago? I can’t believe we’re going to have a guy defecate in my suitcase and then I murder him!”During a phone conversation, Lacy, who was in Vermont, discussed the series’s social satire, male Karens and Season 2 possibilities. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.HBO just announced a renewal of “The White Lotus” for a second season, to focus on a new location, new staff and new guests.This is the first I’m hearing of it! I’m thrilled. I hope I get to have Shane in the background at the pool, complaining about his daiquiri.You think he would go back to a White Lotus resort? He wouldn’t rather avoid the chain entirely?I don’t think shame or embarrassment are in his wheelhouse. He might be haunted by what happened and make up some excuse why he’s not going back, but it would be out of paranoia. I think he assumes people are whispering, “That’s the guy who killed the guy.” The more brazen Shane move is to play the victim: “I should be able to stay at any one of these places for free, anywhere in the world, for the rest of my life, because of what they put me through! I should have sued them for this!” That might actually be his mentality, to think he’s got the short end of the stick as a multimillionaire 30-year-old. He doesn’t know he’s the villain, not the victim.Shane appears to escape all accountability and just walk away from the death he caused. On the other hand, Kai (Kekoa Kekumano) will likely be severely punished for stealing the Mossbachers’ jewelry.I think that’s intentional. In this “White Lotus”-reality, here’s how one class of person is treated by the criminal justice system and here’s how someone with access, money and privilege is treated. Yes, you would normally be told, “Don’t leave the island,” or “Don’t leave the state.” But Shane’s dad probably called in a favor — a senator? a judge? That’s how at times a certain level of this world operates. Kai will be a felon, but Shane will not have to serve any time — and Shane will still paint himself as a victim, because he might become a social pariah. He might not be invited to summer parties in the Hamptons because of this.How replicable do you think the show’s concept is as it continues as an anthology series? How many oblivious rich people can we take?If Mike White didn’t have more to offer at this same level, he would go do something else. But you could do something more like “Upstairs, Downstairs,” with the second season being more about the service end of things.People have been talking about how the show is about entitlement, but Mike says it’s more about how money corrupts the dynamics of every relationship, whether it’s a business relationship, a friendship or a marriage. Tanya [Jennifer Coolidge] unfairly dangles this hope to Belinda [Natasha Rothwell] of having her own spa, and it’s messed up how quickly she snatches that hope away. But you also see how Belinda changes in the face of this opportunity. Nobody’s free from it, except maybe Quinn [Fred Hechinger] and the guys in the outrigger canoe, because none of them are making money from the ocean. There is a certain equality in that relationship.The story also seems to be about complicity. When Rachel joins Shane at the airport, she is essentially accepting his objectionable qualities in exchange for the benefits he provides. But since she spent the night in another hotel room, do you think she knew that Shane killed Armond?Oh, man! I always assumed that she knew, but maybe she just heard through the hotel, “Oh, somebody killed somebody.” Or maybe Shane’s mother Kitty [Molly Shannon] called her and told her. But it would be a wonderful scene to show her finding out after they get on the plane. He’d be like, “I killed that guy,” and she’d be like, “What are you talking about?! Oh no, no, no, no! I thought you were just rude to waiters!”But yeah, she’s giving Shane a get-out-of-jail-free card with her decision to stay. It’s just short of being in abusive relationship. The conclusion she’s come to is that having money is better than not having money in a capitalist society, but that’s not a healthy choice. You want to see her follow her heart, but that’s not what happens here. She makes a pretty pragmatic choice as to what she wants her life to be. Maybe she regrets it later. Maybe she walks away. But for the moment, she is settling, essentially, and the cost is the loss of some sense of self.“She’s giving Shane a get-out-of-jail-free card with her decision to stay,” said Lacy, with Alexandra Daddario in the season finale of “The White Lotus.”HBOOne of the things Shane and Rachel fight about is having sex on their honeymoon. Isn’t that when you’re supposed to have the most sex of your life?Some of what we shot didn’t make it in. We had one scene where Shane wanted to have sex, and Rachel wasn’t quite saying no, but she wasn’t in the mood. It’s not assault, but they took it out because it ended up looking far more aggressive than what they had intended. The purpose of the story wasn’t meant to be that Shane sexually assaulted his partner as much as he was not reading when she was in the mood or not.Some of those references about how sexed up he is maybe made more sense with those kinds of pieces in there. I think there is a multitude of things happening under that, too. She’s saying, “My concern is that is all you want from me.” She’s not saying, “This is too much sex.”If it were a white woman trying to get Armond fired, we’d have a name for her: Karen. I don’t know if we have a male equivalent of that name, but here it seems like “Shane” might work.I hope it does! The Karen thing is like, “I won’t stand for this,” as if they’re taking the side of justice. And Shane’s thing is, “Don’t make me make this ugly.” There is this aggression there, like, “I won’t be treated this way!” It’s the same in Shane as it is in a Karen.At the same time, Armond gave him the wrong room. I mean, these rooms cost $26,000 a night. It’s as if you bought a car, and they were like, “Oh, we just know this is the one you wanted,” and you’re like, “This is definitely not the car I paid for.” He booked a room, and he feels they should give him that room. Even if his behavior is increasingly inappropriate, and the way he treats people is terrible, what he wants seems pretty fair: “I want what I paid for.” Not that that excuses his behavior. In a perfect world, he would chill out and let it go.Who do you think was the worst?I feel like people are going to say Shane, but that’s my guy! I still have a little empathy for him. I feel like most of these characters are pretty unpalatable. In actions alone, Shane is the worst, for sure. No one else kills a guy. But Paula [Brittany O’Grady], as honest and progressive as she claims to be, is an accomplice to a felony, and when the rubber meets the road, she gets back on a plane. She doesn’t say anything. And Rachel will put up with Shane if it means she gets the nice dinners.To me, a lot of the show is saying is, “How clean are you? How innocent are you? How free of guilt are you?” Whether it’s the opportunities you’ve had that others haven’t, or your privilege, or money, or the way you look, or the color of your skin — if you’re in a transactional world, how clean are you?The hope is that all this gets reflected back to the audience: “You probably do some of the same things, don’t you? On some level?” Whether it’s at the Four Seasons, the carwash, in line at McDonald’s or at Starbucks, how much expectation do you have for what the world owes you and how you deserve to be treated?That is the part of the show that most intrigues me. It’s less about who’s worse, and more about who’s kidding themselves the most. More

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    In ‘The White Lotus,’ Mike White Takes You on Vacation

    The writer’s latest investigation of human frailty and craven behavior focuses on wealthy resort guests and the hotel workers who cater to their whims.Last September, the writer-director Mike White checked into a recently reopened but still deserted Four Seasons on Maui. He was the first guest since March. The staff gave him a standing ovation. More

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    Review: ‘The White Lotus’ Offers Scenery From the Class Struggle

    Mike White’s one-percenter satire for HBO is a sun-soaked tale of money, death and customer service.What do people expect from their vacations? Rest? Sure. Fun? Absolutely. But also miracles.They want one week out of the year to somehow rectify the other 51; to make them fall in love, or back in love; to strengthen tattered family bonds; to provide closure; to create deathbed memories; to summon magic, serendipitously yet on demand. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘The Celebrity Dating Game’ and a Father’s Day Special

    “The Dating Game” gets a celebrity revival, “Rick and Morty” returns and Oprah Winfrey hosts a Black Father’s Day special with Sterling K. Brown.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, June 14-20. Details and times are subject to change. More

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    Discovery and AT&T: How a Huge Media Deal Was Done

    An early-morning meeting at a Greenwich Village townhouse, under the watchful eye of Steve McQueen, was part of a monthslong campaign.In the predawn hours of April 1, David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery, arrived at a rented townhouse in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village — decorated with photos of rock stars and one of the actor Steve McQueen in sunglasses holding a gun — to prepare for a meeting that would soon reverberate across the American media industry. More

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    ‘In Treatment’ Is Back. How Does That Make You Feel?

    Pandemic tensions led HBO to make a new version of the therapy drama, which stars Uzo Aduba and aims to reduce stigmas about mental health care.The writer Jennifer Schuur (“My Brilliant Friend,” “Unbelievable”) has seen the same therapist every week for 17 years. “It is one of the most significant relationships of my life,” she said. Sometimes friends and family question that longevity. More

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    AT&T's WarnerMedia Group to Merge With Discovery

    AT&T’s WarnerMedia group is merging with the reality programmer Discovery. What does that mean for your favorite shows?It’s as if Logan Roy, the fictional patriarch of the Waystar Royco media empire on HBO’s popular series “Succession,” masterminded the deal himself: AT&T has thrown in the towel on its media business and decided to spin it off into a new company that will merge with Discovery Inc. More

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    Review: ‘The Nevers,’ From HBO and (Formerly) Joss Whedon

    An allegorical alt-superhero series about gifted women in Victorian London makes it to the screen, but without its currently embattled creator.One of the puzzlements of “The Nevers,” the new alt-superhero show beginning Sunday on HBO, is the title. The peculiarly gifted late-Victorian Londoners, mostly women, who serve as the show’s heroes (and some of its villains) are never called “nevers”; they’re most often referred to as the Touched. In the first four of the series’s 12 episodes, nothing is called the Nevers. You can understand not calling a show “The Touched,” but it’s still a little confusing.And the confusion doesn’t end there. “The Nevers,” while handsomely produced and, from moment to moment, reasonably diverting, doesn’t catch fire in those early episodes in part because we — along with the characters — are still trying to figure out what the heck is going on.Before this goes any further, it’s time to mention that “The Nevers” — a rare case these days of a genre series not based on an existing property — was created for the screen by Joss Whedon. There are things to be explained about Whedon’s involvement with the show, but for now let’s stick to the synergism between the new series and his great creation, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”In “Buffy” Whedon worked out one of the best and most sustained metaphors American pop culture has seen: California teenage life as a constant battle against demons, aided by the small band of friends who really get you. In “The Nevers” he tries something similar but in period costume, giving X-Men-like powers to women and other devalued members of Victorian society so that they can actually raise their voices against — and physically confront — the male, colonialist, capitalist hegemony.It sounds good in theory, as if it might have “Buffy”-like potential, with the added enjoyment of a gloss on sources like “Frankenstein,” “Dracula” and “Alice in Wonderland” — a league of extraordinary Victorian women.But in practice it doesn’t take off. It may be that Whedon and his collaborators, including the “Buffy” writer and producer Jane Espenson, just didn’t have the same feel for turn-of-the-20th-century London as they did for contemporary suburban California — there’s a slightly stilted and synthetic quality to “The Nevers,” despite (or maybe reinforced by) the occasional anachronistically modern dialogue. The humor feels arch, and the action, which combines 21st-century fluidity with a rollicking period style, is mostly flat.But there’s also a problem with the overall conception. The allegory in “Buffy” felt universally human and, despite its 1990s suburban specificity, timeless; the framework of “The Nevers” feels narrower, a more self-conscious attempt to tweak a historical situation to make it relevant to the current social and political moment, with suggestions of human trafficking and medical experimentation and a literal, highly graphic depiction of the silencing of women’s voices. (The series was announced in the summer of 2018, about nine months after the first major #MeToo revelations.)And that need for the show to resonate with our present priorities ties into the frustrating vagueness, so far, of the storytelling. The main action of “The Nevers” takes place three years after an “event” whose details won’t be spoiled here. The event led to the disparate abilities, referred to as “turns,” that some Londoners now possess, from typical mutant stuff like seeing the future and physical strength to more unusual afflictions like speaking only in non-English languages or an “Alice in Wonderland”-like propensity to grow in height.Ann Skelly in “The Nevers.” The characters’ abilities originated with an event of mysterious origin and significance.Keith Bernstein/HBOBut it seems — and here it gets unclear — that either everyone has forgotten what the event was, or they have for some reason chosen not to talk about it. You can see a practical reason for this: It tilts the show away from science fiction and puts the emphasis on a mix of fantasy, mystery and period crime drama. Another, less charitable, observation is that it allowed Whedon to indulge in big-conspiracy plotting and delayed narrative gratification in ways that are, so far, more irritating than intriguing.None of this might matter if there were characters that we really cared about and performances that drew us in, but “The Nevers” is also lacking in those departments. The main characters — the action-oriented, prescient Amalia (Laura Donnelly) and the gadget-maker Penance (Ann Skelly), who lead a community of the Touched — are thinly drawn and at best moderately engaging. There are performers around the edges who generate more interest, including Ben Chaplin as a sympathetic policeman, Pip Torrens as an antagonistic aristocrat and Eleanor Tomlinson as a Touched woman gifted with a supernatural singing ability.In considering the future course of “The Nevers,” of course, it’s necessary to point out that Whedon is no longer involved with the show — he left it late last year, coincidentally or not following a round of public accusations of tyrannical and misogynistic behavior on the sets of previous projects. HBO is releasing the series in two blocks of six episodes each, and recent promotional materials have specified that Whedon’s name is attached only to the first block. (Philippa Goslett is now the showrunner; Whedon directed three of the first six episodes and wrote the pilot.)So to a far greater extent than usual, the progress of “The Nevers” through its first season is anyone’s guess, though Amalia probably knows how it all turns out. More