Mar
Jason Isaacs on His Bold Moment in The White Lotus: ‘Go Big or Go Home’
“It is now in my contract for every show I do,” Jason Isaacs jokingly told Entertainment Weekly after his full-frontal scene in The White Lotus season 3, episode 4, titled “Hide or Seek.”
Warning: Spoilers for The White Lotus season 3, episode 4 ahead.
Timothy Ratliff (Isaacs) is keeping major secrets from his family in The White Lotus, but that didn’t stop him from an unintentional moment of total exposure. The latest season of Mike White’s acclaimed HBO series has added another full-frontal male moment to its growing roster, placing Isaacs alongside his onscreen son Patrick Schwarzenegger, as well as previous actors Theo James (season 2) and Steve Zahn (season 1).
Upon arriving in Thailand, Timothy’s seemingly perfect life begins to unravel when he discovers he’s under FBI investigation for money laundering and bribery. As the pressure mounts, he keeps his wife Victoria (Parker Posey), sons Saxon (Schwarzenegger) and Lochlan (Sam Nivola), and daughter Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) in the dark. But in “Hide or Seek,” a drug-induced haze leads to an awkward and revealing moment—literally. High on the Lorazepam he swiped from his wife, Timothy unknowingly leans back in his robe, accidentally exposing himself to his entire family.
“Yeah, it is now in my contract for every show I do, so we’ll see,” Isaacs quipped to EW, laughing about the scene. “It’ll get easier, hopefully.”
Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, had his own perspective. “You should be asking what it was like for us to watch it,” he joked, prompting another laugh from Isaacs.
While Timothy’s family barely reacted—Victoria rolled her eyes, Saxon laughed, Lochlan cringed, and Piper hid her face—Isaacs took a deeper approach to the moment, considering what led his character to this low point.
“He’s drugging himself into a stupor to avoid facing the fact that his entire life is imploding,” Isaacs explained. “Reading the scripts, I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I’ve got to keep my powder dry for five or six episodes, and then this really kicks off.’ There are things coming that you haven’t seen yet, but I knew I had to dig deep for what’s ahead.”
Isaacs teased that the remainder of his season 3 arc veers into “Shakespearean tragedy territory” as Timothy’s carefully concealed secrets inch closer to the surface. “He’s been bottling it up for a very long time,” he said. “There’s a point coming where they have to leave—if they even make it out alive, because who knows—but the big secret he’s harboring will become unavoidable.”
To bring Timothy’s internal turmoil to life, Isaacs immersed himself in the role but admitted he isn’t sure how audiences will perceive his performance. “I don’t know how I pulled it off,” he said. “The audience will decide whether I did or not. I just remember thinking, ‘Go big or go home.’ And when certain things happen that I can’t discuss, I had to tap into a different kind of mania and terror. You have to get there—to be as real as possible. And, yeah, it required some internal gear changes.”
Since Timothy’s struggle is largely silent, Isaacs found it uniquely challenging. “It didn’t feel easy, because I like words—I like talking,” he said. “Not that characters should talk all the time, but I knew I couldn’t share anything with anyone, apart from the audience, and that was mostly done wordlessly in a drugged stupor. That was always going to be a challenge—not to just be the boring guy falling asleep.”
But in this case, “boring guy falling asleep” managed to contribute to The White Lotus’ growing trend of male full-frontal nudity—something that has now, unofficially, become part of the show’s identity.
The White Lotus season 3 airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO.
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