When gay drama Looking was cancelled after two seasons, fans campaigned for it to continue. He’d unzip it and there was a big shit in there. He had a pineapple lampshade on his head, pineapple curtains hanging from his shoulders and a suitcase strapped to his front. One guy here in Cape Cod dressed as the Pineapple Suite. A lot of people dressed up as White Lotus characters for Halloween, too. Those memes where the suitcase represented people’s 2021 plans and I was Covid, crapping on them, were very funny. When we told Mike what we’d come up with, he was like, “Oh my God, can we do that?”, with a shit-eating grin on his face.ĭid you enjoy all the memes that did the rounds? Lukas and I came up with that ourselves, not only to reflect the dynamic between our characters but also to be suitably shocking for the guy who walks in on us. There’s always an awkwardness to those scenes, especially if your face is in someone’s butt in front of 60 strangers, but by that stage we were well into the shoot and having so much fun. You and he had one particularly, ahem, exuberant sex scene together. It’s great that Lukas had the last laugh. That blew up while we shooting and we all watched it. Your cast mate Lukas Gage, who plays Dillon the waiter, went viral after a director criticised his apartment during a Zoom audition… I took it as a huge compliment, because I grew up watching Fawlty Towers and John Cleese is such a genius. Not until I started hearing it when the show aired.
Some people compared Armond to Basil Fawlty. There were moments of terror, but mostly it was pure joy. I just want to kiss Mike all over his face. That way, we could unleash him later, when he’s drugged up and flying. Me and Mike agreed that for all his showmanship and largeness, we wanted him to feel like a real person, not a caricature. The scripts were mind-blowingly well written and I instantly felt like I’d come across Armond-like characters in my life. How did you go about creating the character of Armond? One guy here in Cape Cod dressed as the Pineapple Suite We were pinching ourselves.Ī lot of people dressed up as White Lotus characters for Halloween. You could put your head underwater and hear the whales. We worked hard, but at the end of the day we’d go down to the beach and swim at sunset. It was weird and wonderful to be in a five-star resort for that long. We had the entire resort, living and working there, and couldn’t leave for the whole two-and-a-half-month shoot. How was the experience of filming it in lockdown? I felt guilty talking to my actor friends about it because it was such a dreamy job.
There’d been times early in the pandemic when I thought: “Should I get another skill? Maybe acting won’t be a thing any more.” So The White Lotus came as an extraordinary surprise. Before I knew it, I was on the plane to Hawaii and landing in paradise, which was bizarre and thrilling. I did a self-tape audition in lockdown, then spoke to Mike White on the phone. How did you land your role in The White Lotus ? This year, he starred as luxury Hawaii spa resort manager Armond in HBO’s hit satire The White Lotus, shown in the UK on Sky Atlantic.
Subsequent TV credits include Dom Basaluzzo in HBO’s gay comedy-drama Looking and Michael “Mouse” Tolliver in the Netflix revival of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. He worked in Australian TV and film before being cast as a guest star in Sex and the City in 2002. S ydney-born actor Murray Bartlett, 50, made his screen debut aged 16 in medical soap The Flying Doctors.