At an Emmys FYC event for The White Lotus on Tuesday, creator Mike White made a special video appearance en route to his next gig — competing on Survivor‘s milestone 50th season.
White — who previously competed on the show in 2018 during its “David vs. Goliath” season, coming in second place — said via video message that he was on his way to “a hotel near the airport where I have to turn in my phone and stay the night before I fly to Fiji, because I don’t know if you know this but I’m going on Survivor. So by the time you see this I will either be out of the game or I’ll be starving on an island somewhere — either way, I hope you send me good wishes.”
He also sent his thanks to the audience for showing up to support the show and to his cast, who he hopes to see “on the flip side. And yeah, I’m sorry I couldn’t be there but this is what I have to do to get a vacation these days. Duty calls.”
During the main event, the super-sized cast was split into two panels, both moderated by Hacks‘ Paul W. Downs. The first featured Leslie Bibb, Michelle Monaghan, Carrie Coon, Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey, Sam Nivola and Sarah Catherine Hook, as Downs teased, “In the four years The White Lotus has been on the air, it has spanned three continents and four HBO names — pretty remarkable stuff.”
The cast talked about their collaborations with White and fears going into the show, as Isaacs noted he was worried that his pill-popping head of the Ratliff family “might just sit there in the corner and look like an extra from Cheech & Chong. I’m chugging these pills — I know what’s gonna be going on inside my head, I’ll think it all and I’ll feel it all, but I just don’t know if the audience gonna get any of it.”
Aimee Lou Wood, Sam Nivola, Tayme Thapthimthong, Walton Goggins, Parker Posey, Natasha Rothwell, Sarah Catherine Hook, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Carrie Coon, Jason Isaacs, Sam Rockwell and Leslie Bibb at the FYC event.
Araya Doheny/Getty Images for HBO
It was also revealed that Posey and Bibb still haven’t watched the show, as the group weighed in on how their lives have changed since the third season premiered. “I really have to think about what I’m wearing and what I’m saying in public,” Coon said, noting, “Now when I go to the grocery store, people will be like, ‘Great job last night.’ I was like, oh no, that’s not happened to me before. [But] it peaks when the show is on, then it kind of goes down — for me, maybe not for Parker.”
Nivola said he’s enjoying the perks of now “every time I get Thai food, free mango sticky rice,” as Coon admitted, “My parents still haven’t mentioned it. I think they watched it, but they haven’t said anything.”
Natasha Rothwell, Sam Rockwell, Walton Goggins, Aimee Lou Wood, Patrick Schwarzenegger and Tayme Thapthimthong took part in the second panel, with Rockwell and Goggins breaking down their scenes together.
“Was he on drugs when he wrote that?” Rockwell teased of White writing his character’s wild monologue, as well as the “extraordinary thing to act with a close friend” when it came to his longtime relationship with Goggins.
“I didn’t want to let Sam down. This is my hero. I got Bob Duvall, I got like Tommy Lee Jones, I got Chris Cooper and I got Sam Rockwell,” Goggins told the crowd, as Rockwell took out his wallet and threw him a few bucks. Goggins then realized it was only $3 and joked, “You think I’m that cheap?!”
Goggins also explained that his interpretation of his character Rick’s “parable is in the depths of our despair, there’s always beauty around us, always. And I think about that in my own life, I think that’s what’s changed me most — all of these people in Thailand and getting to work with Mike White, but that reminder that, like fuck, I can’t deal with what’s going on in my life right now. Yeah, you can, man, just focus on what’s beautiful in your life. And it was one of the greatest rides of my life.”
