Spoilers for this season of The White Lotus.
I’ve been a big Carrie Coon for years, even though I never watched or cared about The Leftovers. But I think she’s an amazing shapeshifter who can play anything and anyone, and I’ve really enjoyed her role in the third season of The White Lotus. She’s one of a trio of 40-something blonde friends on vacation in Thailand. The “blonde trio” storyline is the most relatable for much of the audience – an extremely realistic look at how women connect and fall apart and snipe at each other and gossip. Well, Carrie chatted with Harper’s Bazaar ahead of next Sunday’s TWL season finale. For what it’s worth, I seriously doubt the blonde trio will be the ones who die in the finale! I think it’s going to be Walton Goggins’ character, Rick. Some highlights from Carrie’s interview:
How she, Leslie Bibb & Michelle Monaghan prepared for their roles as besties: “We jumped on a text thread as soon as we knew who was cast, and we exchanged photographs of ourselves at around the age we thought our characters would have met, maybe eight or nine years old. So that was fun—and it’s the job: building chemistry together. We were living together and getting to know each other. Leslie and I shared a villa at the Four Seasons, and Michelle and Parker [Posey] were next door. We took our meals together, went to the gym and swimming together; we were basically building a friendship as our friendship on the show was being deconstructed.
The most relatable storyline: “I would say that our storyline was the most relatable because it’s the one piece of the puzzle that everybody has some relationship to. The other stuff may feel far from people’s own experiences, but I think everybody has some idea understanding of female friendship, whether it be personally or culturally.
Everyone gossips: “We’d be lying if we say we’ve never been in those situations. You’d have to have a lot of integrity to never gossip. I actually don’t have a close group of female friends from my childhood. That’s just not the way my life unfolded. So that part was actually quite far from my own experience—questioning how much of a friendship is history and force of habit and how much is actual shared interest. And we’re all women in our 40s, reflecting and questioning our life choices. I think middle age is tricky in that way. You can’t help but compare yourself to other people. We have brains built on comparison. And you’re right, it’s not gendered. Everybody’s engaging in that because everyone is comparing themselves to others and performing “self” on some level.
Lori is an alcoholic: “I think she’s on a journey of discovering just how much of it she has. So many of the problems we have in our relationships come from being reactive. You see a lot of reactive behavior on this girl’s trip, from everybody. If they had just shown up at the villa on day one and said, “Listen, I going to put it all out there…,” and been really honest about where they were in their lives and how they were feeling, they would have had such a different vacation. But they didn’t. They kept up the the performance. No relationship can survive that lack of honesty. And I think Lori’s an alcoholic, and I don’t think you can continue to be an alcoholic and live a fully examined life. Those two things don’t really go together.
Lori’s alcoholism is in the script: “It was definitely in the text. They talk about her drinking being problematic, and it was also often scripted in our scenes that they were drinking. But I made a choice to make sure she was always drinking and that she always had one glass half gone and another one on the way. That’s how she’s vacationing. Her life is falling apart, and she’s not being honest about it. And, geez, how many people are moving through the world that way?
Mike White edited out some backstory on Lori’s life: “There was a bit more context to her home life. You originally found out that her daughter was actually non-binary, maybe trans, and going by they/them. You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting. It was only a short scene, but for me, it did make the question [in episode 3] of whether Kate voted for Trump so much more provocative and personally offensive to Laurie, considering who her child is in the world. But the season was written before the election. And considering the way the Trump administration has weaponized the cultural war against transgender people even more since then, when the time came to cut the episode down, Mike felt that the scene was so small and the topic so big that it wasn’t the right way to engage in that conversation.
Carrie is such a good actress, I actually forgot that her character is supposed to be an alcoholic. That’s how subtly she’s played it in the last half of the season, which is also pretty realistic. Her friends are not going to challenge her on her drinking problem, so she’s just guzzling wine all day every day. As for the backstory on Lori’s kid… that’s interesting, because Mike White did leave in that initial conversation where Lori’s friends are talking around Lori’s life in NYC. I get why they just lifted out that backstory though, and they were right to do so.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Fabio Lovino/HBO/Avalon.
