Pretty much every episode of the latter half of Season 3 of The White Lotus has had everyone unintentionally recreating that Walter Goggins reaction image meme, so it may come as no surprise to learn that series creator Mike White apparently "hallucinated" the plot while on heavy medication via a nebulizer during a hospitalization for bronchitis.
In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, White admitted to being hesitant to even consider Thailand as the location for the show's third season, having previously spent time there while competing on The Amazing Race with his father.
"Originally, I wanted to shoot in Japan," the creator of the hit HBO series explained. "I was in Thailand when my dad and I got eliminated from The Amazing Race — two weeks in an elimination station with all these other bitter reality contestants, I was just like, 'I don't ever wanna come back here.'"
White continued, "But HBO was really pushing it because Thailand had good tax incentives. As an artist, your knee-jerk reaction is, 'I'm not doing that!'"
Obviously, the filmmaker eventually came around on the idea — but when he returned to the country on a location-scouting trip, his negative experiences there continued: White became ill and had to be hospitalized in Chiang Mai.
"I got really sick with bronchitis," he recalled. "They put me on a nebulizer. It was like I'd smoked crack — not that I've smoked crack. For two days, I did not sleep. I was just lying in a hospital bed, trying to think about what the show was, and it came to me."
The White Lotus producer David Bernad added, "I saw Mike the next morning, and he told me what he'd hallucinated. That's basically what we shot."
"I've dabbled in Buddhism, and Thailand worked for the themes that I was trying to get into," White went on. "The show is about identity and desire — and then there's another part of me, the mischievous gay part, that's just like, 'How do I create something that's dirty and funny?'"
"It's amusing to me when people approach the show in this very literal way, like the show is about [spoiler] incest," he added of the subplot between brothers Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and Lochlan Ratliff (Sam Nivola). "I'm glad we found you, but you're not really the audience."