Jason Isaacs is looking back at his time on “The White Lotus.”
The actor, 61, recently addressed rumors that there was tension on set of the HBO show during its third season.
Isaacs, who played Tim Ratliff, said while on SiriusXM’s “The Happy Hour” show that the cast and crew “were in a little pressure cooker together” during shooting.
Of course, that could lead to issues arising.
“Like anywhere you go for the summer, there’s friendships, there’s romances, there’s arguments, there’s cliques that form and break and reform and stuff like that,” said Issacs. “I’m careful. I’m not stupid. I look at the Internet. I only read every single word written about ‘The White Lotus’ and about everybody in it.”
“The Patriot” star also wants the internet detectives to know that he sees their theories and they couldn’t be farther from the truth.
“Nobody has the slightest clue what they’re talking about,” Issacs explained. “People who think they’re onto something, and it then it gets magnified because of a thousand other people. Nobody has any clue.”
“First of all, it’s none of your business,” he added of rumored drama between cast and crew. “I’m just saying it wasn’t a holiday, and partly I started saying that because people think we were on a seven-month holiday, and believe me, it felt like work a lot of the time.”
Issacs reiterated that spending any amount of time on a vacation could cause its normal issues, much like viewers see within the series itself.
“It was insanely hot and there’s all the normal social tensions you get anywhere. But for all of you [that] think you’ve cracked it by something you think someone has posted or is in a photo or not, you’re just so far from the truth, believe me.”
This wasn’t the first time Issacs hinted at drama between the cast.
“It was like a cross between summer camp and ‘Lord of the Flies’ but in a gilded cage. It wasn’t a holiday,” he expressed during an interview with Vulture. “Some people got very close, there were friendships that were made and friendships that were lost.”
“All the things you would imagine with a group of people unanchored from their home lives on the other side of the world, in the intense pressure cooker of the working environment with eye-melting heat and insects and late nights,” Issacs added.
“They say in the show, ‘What happens in Thailand stays in Thailand,’ but there’s an off-screen ‘White Lotus’ as well, with fewer deaths but just as much drama,” the “Harry Potter” star concluded.
Although when asked if he’d like to dive deeper into his answers, Issacs firmly stated, “Absolutely not. I became very close to some people and less close to others, but we still all had that experience together and there’s a certain level of discretion required.”
Issacs’ comments come amid speculation that his co-stars Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Wood had a falling out.
During Sunday’s Season 3 finale, couple Rick (Goggins, 53,) and Chelsea (Wood, 31) die together in Thailand. Despite past positive interviews about one another, the actors don’t follow each other on Instagram.
A Reddit thread claimed that the unfollowing happened weeks ago. Additionally, users pointed out that Goggins and Wood didn’t do press together to promote the season — nor did they tag one another in Instagram cast photos.
In February, Wood told Vanity Fair at the Season 3 premiere, “I did make really, really amazing friends. Walton, because we had all of our scenes together, we were very close.”
Goggins echoed his co-star’s sentiments in a March interview with the Telegraph. The actor said he knew that Wood would be “a very special person in my life,” and called the actress “on some levels, a soulmate.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
