‘The White Lotus’ Has Reportedly Picked Where It Will Set Season 3
Buckle up, Lotus-heads: We have another piece of key information about the impending third season. Those involved with The White Lotus have been hinting pretty much ever since season 2 aired that they’d like to set the third season somewhere in Asia. Creator Mike White’s friend Johnny Knoxville had previously suggested that White was eyeing Tokyo, but a new report says Season 3 is heading to a different spot on the continent.
Variety has received word from multiple sources—though HBO declined to comment—that the production is heading to Thailand to film Season 3 of the explosively successful satire-meets-murder-mystery. With Season 1 being film at a Four Seasons in Oahu in Hawaii and Season 2 shot at a Four Seasons in Sicily, the publication notes this new locale gives The White Lotus the opportunity to keep up this pattern, as the country has four Four Seasons locations to choose from: in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Koh Samui, and the Golden Triangle.
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Our other major clue so far about Season 3 has come directly from White, who said in an HBO featurette that he wants to explore the theme of death within the show’s third chapter.
“The first season kind of highlighted money, and then the second season is sex,” he says. “And I think the third season, it would be, maybe, a kind of satirical and funny look at death, and Eastern religion, and spirituality.”
The idea of a typical crew of White Lotus hotel guests traveling to Thailand to find spirituality isn’t at all hard to picture, and we wonder whether the death of Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge), the only character to appear in both Seasons 1 and 2 of The White Lotus, will continue to play a role in the plot of upcoming season. Each of the four Thai cities with a Four Seasons hotel has a rich array of Buddhist temples that could serve as a backdrop for the tourists’ search for enlightenment and offer religious cultural landmarks that the Season 3 characters could potentially be angling their trips around: Bangkok’s Emerald Buddha statue, for example, or Chiang Mai’s sacred Doi Suthep site.
Now that the word is out, hopefully we’ll start to get details on the actual plot White has in mind—according to HBO CEO Casey Bloys, it’s “really fun.”
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