If you watched the latest instalment of The White Lotus and found yourself feeling envious of the cast for getting to spend all that time in the sun aboard a fabulous super yacht – rest assured, it wasn’t half as glamorous as it sounded.
Since the new season of the award-winning anthology series premiered, the cast and crew have made no secret of the fact that the seven-month shoot in Thailand was anything but a holiday, largely down to the unbearable heat (and the fact air conditioning was too noisy to be used on set).
And according to cast member Charlotte Le Bon – who plays party girl Chloe – this was definitely the case while filming on the yacht.
“It was so hot. It was the hottest I’ve ever been in my life, definitely,” she told Variety. “Even the locals were suffering.
“We would leave the hotel, go to the port, and that would probably be a 35-minute ride, and then we would take a speed boat, and then we would have to do a 40-minute speed boat on waves [...] we were taking nausea pills, and then going on the boat.”
Charlotte added that because director of photography Ben Kutchins “was so precise with what he wanted in the background”, the boat was constantly having to be turned around, which she described as “the most nauseous thing ever”.
As if all of that wasn’t enough, Jason Isaacs then injured himself in a grisly accident that apparently left “blood everywhere”.
On Tuesday morning, Jason also recalled to Virgin Radio: “We were on a billionaire’s yacht – a super yacht – which by the way, only ever rented, apart from us, to oligarchs, big Russian gangsters essentially.
“I asked the crew, ‘What’s it like having us here?’ They said, ‘Well, it’s nice not to have the gangsters and all the guns’, and I said, ‘Who else do you rent to?’ And there was a kind of blank pause, and they went, ‘No, that’s all we do’.”
Jason added that the crew then told him: “The most terrifying thing about it is you don’t want to clean their room because they have bags of millions of dollars in there, and they might accuse you of stealing. But they do tip well.”
New episodes of The White Lotus drop every Monday on Sky and Now in the UK. Listen to Jason Isaacs’ full interview on the Virgin Radio app.