Warning: This story contains spoilers for the season three finale of The White Lotus.
Jason Isaacs had an emotional stay at The White Lotus.
The 61-year-old actor—who starred as shady businessman Timothy Ratliff in the HBO series—recently reflected on his role, including how challenging it was to navigate his character’s grim thoughts in the show’s season three finale.
“That was one of the saddest things I’ve ever done,” Jason said in his April 9 appearance on CNN News. “When I read the script, I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if I can convincingly believe myself that I would ever do that.’”
Throughout the season, viewers watched as Timothy tried to hide his money laundering scheme away from his family. This effort makes him spiral out of control, leading him to contemplate a murder-suicide in the April 6 finale. Timothy served his wife Victoria (Parker Posey), older son Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and daughter Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) poisonous piña coladas, but he stopped his plan at the last second and poured the drinks down the drain.
Those piña coladas almost came back to haunt him the next morning, when his other son Lochlan (Sam Nivola) made himself a smoothie with the remaining poisonous seeds. However, he was revived in his father’s arms, and the episode ended with the family potentially finding out about Timothy’s legal issues.
In the CNN interview, Jason confessed that he was “unbelievably sad” when he prepared to film the almost-lethal scene.
“People think that acting is pretending, but it’s not, really,” the Harry Potter star explained. “You just have to be someone else in a different situation, and I tried, as much as I could, to be someone who thought the only way out—who’s also drugged out of his mind—of that shame is to kill everybody that he loves. It just made me very miserable watching it again.”
And while it was a tense ending to a chaotic season, Jason didn’t watch it alone. He revealed after the final episode that some of his onscreen family—alongside costars Aimee Lou Wood, Nicholas Duvernary, Leslie Bibb, Tayme Thapthimthong, Jon Gries, and Charlotte Le Bon—watched the finale together.
“We were all crying backstage, we held each other for a long time,” Jason said during an April 6 screening, per The Hollywood Reporter. “I don’t know if it’s because this thing is coming to an end or because it’s just such a beautiful story.”
Now that the Ratcliffs have sailed off from Thailand, viewers are interested in knowing if they’ll return to the show’s fourth season. Keep reading to find out more details…
When will the fourth season of The White Lotus premiere?
HBO officially renewed The White Lotus for a fourth season in January, weeks before the third season premiered and after series creator Mike White pitched ideas for another go-round of moneyed murder and mayhem.
“Mike, obviously—if he wants to move forward and do the four seasons—he will do the fourth season,” HBO CEO Casey Bloys told reporters in November.
Production on season four will likely kick off in 2026, according to Variety.
Where will The White Lotus‘ fourth season take place?
Though there have been reports that the fourth season is heading to France, White and fellow producers haven’t yet confirmed their season four destination themselves. But they’ve been dropping hints.
“We’re going on some locations scouting in the next couple of weeks, so we’ll know soon,” executive vice president of HBO Programming Francesca Orsi told Deadline in February. “I can’t really say where we’re going to land but chances are somewhere in Europe.”
Chances, she emphasized.
There are “some countries on the map that we talked about,” Orsi added, “but nothing to report on until they actually go locations scouting.”
White said in an interview for HBO that ran after the April 6 season three finale that he was looking to “get a little bit out of the ‘crashing waves against rocks’ vernacular” for next season.
“But,” he added, “there’s always room for more murders at the White Lotus hotels.”
White also mentioned Australia as a dream destination while he was in Sydney at the Vivid Festival in June 2023.
“It would be so fun,” he said. “Obviously, there’s a huge wealth of talent here and the beauty is inarguable, so it feels like it checks all the boxes.”
Really, the possibilities are endless, almost: A body in the snow has yet to be a plot point on the series, but a fancy ski resort may not be in the cards. Producer David Bernad told The Guardian in February, “Mike doesn’t like the cold.”
The White Lotus Theme Song May Sound Different in Season 4
Cristóbal Tapia de Veer, the Emmy-winning composer behind the White Lotus title themes, will not be back for season four, citing creative disagreements with White dating back to the show’s first season.
“It’s kind of weird right now because I announced to the team a few months ago that I was not coming back, that I was leaving,” Tapia de Veer told the New York Times in an interview published April 2. “I didn’t tell Mike for various reasons; I wanted to tell him just at the end for the shock and whatever.” (White did find out before season’s end, he said.)
As for the instantly catchy theme music he wrote for season one (that also opened season two), “You see it afterward, and it’s a success,” Tapia de Veer said, “but to get there is quite the struggle” because White “didn’t want the theme.”
And no one told him to retool the opener for season three, he said, but he did—much to fans’ loud consternation.
“When that came out, I had TMZ calling me, even people from England and from France, because they wanted some kind of statement about the theme,” Tapia de Veer said. “People are furious about the change of the theme, and I thought that was interesting. I texted the producer and I told him that it would be great to, at some point, give them the longer version with the ooh-loo-loo-loos, because people will explode if they realize that it was going there anyway. He thought it was a good idea. But then Mike cut that—he wasn’t happy about that.”
The composer added, “I mean, at that point, we already had our last fight forever, I think. So he was just saying no to anything.”
On The Howard Stern Show April 8, White called it a “b–ch” move” for Tapia de Veer to air his grievances like that.
“I honestly don’t know what happened,” White said, “except now I’m reading his interviews because he decides to do some PR campaign about him leaving the show. I just don’t think he respected me.”
They “never really even fought,” the producer continued. “He says we feuded…It was basically me giving him notes.”
Their collaboration “did work” during the first two seasons, White said, because they shared ideas. By season three, Tapia de Veer “didn’t want to go through the process with me, he didn’t want to get notes from me, he didn’t want to go to sessions.”
And, White added, “He’s definitely making a big deal out of just a creative difference.”
Will Gary Return for Season 4 of The White Lotus?
White was pleasantly shocked that Jon Gries, who played Tanya’s mysterious suitor Greg in season one and her calculating husband in season two, agreed to come back to play nefarious widower Gary in season three. But Gries said Gary’s (a.k.a. Greg’s) ship has sailed, as far as he knows.
However, that’s what he thought last time.
“I don’t think [I’m coming back], but I don’t know so,” he told The Hollywood Reporter after season three ended with Gary’s secret safe for now. “All I can say is, every time I leave, I assume it’s over.”
And yet despite the appeal of having all new guests at each resort—”I can burn down the house at the end of every season,” White told The New Yorker, “and start building again”—the show has proved that, if you aren’t dead…
“There’s no trying to predict anything Mike White does,” Gries admitted to THR. “I never presumed I’d be in season two. Same for season three. Everything he does has an element of surprise to it. Yes, I would love to come back. But does the book on Greg seem like it’s complete? I can’t tell you.”
Will The White Lotus Find Some Way for Tanya to Come Back?
Short of a White Lotus prequel or multiverse situation, there’s really no vehicle for Jennifer Coolidge‘s Tanya to return except in a flashback or dream sequence. But the hope has remained ever since her unfortunate tumble from a yacht in the season two finale that revealed her to be the premiere’s mystery body after being the only returning character from season one.
White has admitted to missing Coolidge’s presence, but hasn’t questioned his decision to kill off the well-intentioned but gullible and obscenely wealthy Tanya.
“He sort of sticks to his guns,” Coolidge said of White on E! News in January 2023 after the season two finale. “He’s an amazing friend, but I think he made his decision. He wanted a big, dramatic, Italian, you know, operatic ending for White Lotus 2, and he wanted to sacrifice Tanya.”
Confirming she definitely wouldn’t be showing up in Thailand for season three, she told The New Yorker, “I don’t think Tanya’s ever coming back, so I have to live with it.”
