Episode 4: Sex and Sicily with Guest Dan Savage

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Ethan!

Come here, sit down.

Hey.

Hi.

Are you okay?

You haven't really seemed like yourself the past couple days.

Thank you. Come here, sit down.
Hey. Hi.
You okay?

You haven't really seemed like yourself the past couple days.

Work stuff?

What is it?

You want to know?

Yeah.

I think... You think what?

Cameron and Harper. Cameron You think what? Cameron Harper.
Cameron Harper what? Maybe something happened. Hi everyone, and welcome back to HBO's official White Lotus podcast.
I'm Evan Ross Katz. Today we're diving into some core themes of the White Lotus,

sex and romance.

Obviously, relationships are at the heart of both seasons.

The desire to explore human connection

is basically woven into Mike White's DNA.

But many see sexual and romantic politics

as being particularly central to season two.

And while the first season tackled race and class,

partly by examining the lingering effects of colonialism, the second season shifts our focus by taking us somewhere different. Cheers.
We made it. Welcome to the White Lotus in Sicily.
It's fitting that Mike White sets season two in Sicily. On the one hand, Sicily brims with cinematic history.
It's a major reason why it's captured the imagination of so many American tourists. You made my Italian dream come true.
I feel like Monica Vitti. I really do.
But the island can also be seen as a repository of machismo and traditional gender roles. Hey, what is with these head things? We keep seeing them everywhere.
Tessa di moro. Tessa di moro? Well, the story is, Amur came here a long time ago and seduced a local girl.
But then she found out that he had a wife and children back home. So because he lied to her, she cut his head off.
Oh, Jesus. It's the perfect setting for Mike White to explore some of the issues he does best.
Seduction, desire, suspicion, and betrayal. Stop flirting with my wife.
I'm not a fool. All right, dude.
Are you being serious? I know what you're doing, man. E, are you losing it? There's obviously a lot to untangle here, and I can't do that all by myself.
So I called up an expert to help me out. I loved the first season, of course, but it was really the second season that knocked me flat.
Dan Savage is a sex and relationships advice columnist and podcaster. And he, like me, loves The White Lotus.
There were things in the second season that really are in my wheelhouse about long-term relationships, about desire in long-term relationships, about infidelity, about forgiveness. And, you know, in one way, it's like, oh my God, these are the straight people I write to and talk to all the time.
And then I had to step back and go, and Mike White created them. What Dan's alluding to here is that Mike, like Dan, doesn't identify as straight, and yet, like Dan,

he's still a keen observer of straight relationships. You know, sometimes you write a sex advice column, you talk to straight people about sex, every once in a while you get somebody saying, what do you know about straight people or straight sex or straight relationships? And that's just a straight person projecting onto you their ignorance about gay sex and gay relationships.
Because it is possible to be straight and ignorant of gay sex and gay relationships. It is impossible to be gay and ignorant of straight sex, straight relationships, straight emotional dynamics.
Because we're typically born to, raised by straight people, surrounded by straight people. We're swimming in straight people in a way that straight people are not swimming in gay people.
And we have a perspective on straight relationships and what works about them, what doesn't work about them, and what they might be able to learn from gay people and gay sex and gay relationships and take from us that might improve their relationships. The storyline Dan was most enraptured by was the foursome.
Harper, Ethan, Daphne, and Cameron. As the season unfolds, their dynamic becomes a stage on which Mike White can play out contemporary ideas and anxieties about love and sex.
Like, what does it look like to be in a long-term relationship these days? What turns people on? What keeps them connected? So you're like playing games with them. We both do it.
It's like hide and seek. Keeps things interesting.
Obviously, we wanted to hear about all of this from the actors. Okay, I'm recording.
Hello. Will Sharp told me that when he got the part of Ethan, he hadn't acted in about four years.
He'd spent that period behind the camera directing a movie and then a different HBO project, a miniseries called Landscapers.

If you haven't seen it, you have to check it out.

Ethan is a recently wealthy tech entrepreneur

who's cautiously exploring the benefits of the lavish lifestyle newly afforded to him.

I mean, nothing much has changed, to be honest.

Nice to be able to help people, I guess.

Will was excited about the role, particularly about Ethan's character arc. It felt like in the earlier episodes, it was about holding my nerve, not giving away too much, and kind of somehow trying to portray like an internalized agony and an internalized sort of conflict.
That's what I liked about him was that there was a journey for him. For Will, it was also meaningful that Ethan was non-white.
Ethan's ethnicity, I think, was something that I had on my mind quite a lot, actually. Kind of, how does this character sit in this world of predominantly white privilege? And, you know, is there a part of him that is almost becoming the thing that he hates? And there's like a sort of weird disconnect within himself.
Like he sort of has worked really hard to get to a

place where he gets to go on holidays like this. But there's also a part of him that

feels like he doesn't deserve to be there. And it's just because of, I guess, what he

looks like and what his heritage is.

Is that what happens when you're rich for too long? Your brain just atrophies?

I mean, they seem happy. No way.
It's a front. It's good to have, you know, diverse friends, I guess.
Yeah, I think we're their diverse friends. They're white-passing diverse friends.
Yeah, you're right. I know it's often hard to, like, articulate what chemistry is, but the four of you, there's just an energy.
Did you have a sense that there was just something magnetic about this dynamic? Yeah. I think the energy was sort of intact right from the beginning.
This is Megan Fahey, who plays Daphne. But Megan Fahey doesn't really need an introduction.
She's got one of the most memorable roles in season two and easily became one of its breakout stars. In the show, Daphne is married to Cameron, who's played by Theo James.
Cameron is a quintessential tech bro, and at first, Daphne comes off like an accommodating trophy wife. And baby, thanks for putting up with me.
I love you. But this is the Mike White-iverse after all, so obviously it's a lot more complex than that.
I think that Daphne is a really emotionally intelligent woman, which is something that a lot of people probably wouldn't recognize about her right away. But I think the thing about emotionally intelligent people is they often don't want to present in that way because they usually want to make the people around them feel comfortable.
And they can do that in a number of ways. But I think one of the main ways of doing that is by not being intimidating or seeming judgmental, you know, and that can often be overlooked as being a sign of emotional intelligence and social intelligence as well.
Don't you think it's better to just do what you want, even if it's by yourself? I mean, Cameron does what he wants all the time. Why let them have all the fun? For a while, after the actors arrived in Sicily,

scenes of the two couples together kept getting pushed back. They'd get their call times, go to hair and makeup, get in costume, and then have to go right back to their rooms.
Every time we went in, something would happen, like it would start raining or there'd be like a windstorm or something. And it was almost like a joke that every time us four were called to set it would be like well we have to cancel the day or film something that's inside that's with other people and it does sort of up the stakes of every scene that you do i feel like that was part of the kind of slingshotiness of ethan's trajectory where for so much of the series you're winding him up.
Cameron would always sleep with the girls that I liked, but before I could get to them, if I ever told him that I liked a girl, he would swoop in and have sex with them within a week. Cameron, rude! You have a bad case of something called mimetic desire.
What's that? If someone with higher status and you want something,

it means it's more likely that you will want it to.

You do not have higher status than me.

Not then, maybe.

Amidst all this winding up, Daphne is busy doing something else.

Scheming.

Megan said that one of her favorite scenes,

and one of the most revealing ones about Daphne, occurred outside of the hotel when Daphne and Harper go on their overnight at the palazzo. We're in the pool, and I'm trying to convince her to stay another night, and then I say, like, you know, can I hop out and can I tell Cam first? He has really intense FOMO and also abandonment issues, so it's just going to be really funny to tell him we're living it up at some sick palazzo.
I love that scene because it's like you get to see Daphne be like a little spooky in a way. Like you get to see her be like a little mischievous and that's sort of like the first time that I feel like she's sort of really playing this game with her husband, you know? And I loved how down Mike was to let her be like a little freak in that moment.
You know, like just energetically, like, enjoying the game. To me, it really was this little, like, gold nugget, you know, a window into her complicated brain.
Scenes like this drive home a point that Megan knows intuitively. Daphne is devious.
She's the kind of person who likes to toy with people around her, and that toying ensures that she is never made to feel small. Some people will say to me, you know, they'll be like, oh, I felt so bad for her, for Daphne, you know, at the end.
And it's like, no, why? She was playing the game the whole time. And that was the one thing that Mike was really specific about before we started shooting was that she's not a victim of her circumstances at all.
Dan Savage told me that he was enraptured by the two couples. He saw them as articulating a big question of the second season.
How do you sustain desire in a long-term relationship? Esther Perel, who wrote Mating in Captivity, very wisely said, the paradox of desire in a long-term relationship is to desire is to want, and how do you want what you have when you're married, when you're together, when you're committed, when it's been decades, how do you keep that spark alive?

Harper and Ethan's relationship almost seems like a deposition at all times.

And the betrayals are contained within the relationship because, you know, Ethan is masturbating to porn featuring women that don't look exactly like his wife Harper.

What's with the boner?

Yeah, fair question.

I was jerking off.

Oh. Why? Harper has real illusions about what her relationship is and is very smug about what her relationship is and what it means.
And in some ways she regards her relationship as perfect or projects onto others that her relationship is perfect, but she knows there's a rot at the heart of it and can't quite put her finger on it. They have a twisted relationship.
And we are fine. Compared to them, we are fine.
And of course we begin thinking Daphne and Cameron are shitty and dysfunctional and clueless.

And yet Daphne and Cameron are doing something right that Harper and Ethan aren't doing. They're maintaining their senses of individuality.
And part of what I saw in season two was Daphne and Cameron almost being a stand-in, a more dysfunctional version of the kind of gay relationships you often often see, which are either explicitly open or tacitly open. And it helps strengthen the relationship rather than weaken the relationship, which white threads through scenes with Harper and Ethan being very superior about the fact that they never lie to each other, that they're transparent.
But then there's no gulf to bridge.

Then there's no mystery.

There's no eroticism in their relationship.

They're not fucking.

All this simmering stress finally comes to a boil

in the finale featuring what is probably

the most debated scene of season two.

Of course, I'm talking about the exchange

between Daphne and Ethan on the beach.

Have you been over there yet till you saw LaBella? Do we want to go before we leave? You look so pretty. Come on.
Walk with me. Let's rewind and break down what happens right before.
Ethan confronts Harper about sleeping with Cameron. I was in the water and you guys were doing shots and flirting and whispering to each other

and then I come up here and the fucking door is latched?

Why was the door latched?

Harper admits to kissing him.

All right, I don't know what the fuck happened,

but one thing that I do know is he tried to fuck you.

Where are you going?

Which triggers Ethan to storm off and attack Cameron. Ethan then finds Daphne on the beach and shares his suspicions.
I don't think you have anything to worry about. I mean, we never really know what goes on in people's minds or what they do, right? You spend every second with somebody.
There's still this part that's a mystery. You don't have to know everything to love someone.
Megan and Will told me about shooting this scene. There was a take where Mike was like, I feel like this is where the whole of this trip is just catching up with Ethan and everything he's been bottling up is kind of like just flowing.
It's like finally coming out of him. So I did a take i was finding what she was saying like really affecting and sort of emotional and then and then mike was like yeah i think it's good to have but i don't know maybe we should pull it back and so we went back to something that was a bit more ambiguous or kind of still left us somewhere to go after all of this like sound and fury we arrive at point of stillness i feel like what's

so interesting about that scene is the audience is watching daphne process information in real time and then make a very targeted response and that is the crux of that character is that she is regularly taking in the world around her

and making a very, very deliberate choice in the way that she chooses to respond. And that scene was her doing that in a nutshell.
All of the characters in that series were one way or another trying to find some kind of connection. And Ethan was not an exception.
And in a fucked up way, actually Daphne is sort of seeing him in that moment. That's in a funny way sort of comforting that he feels seen and like there is a connection being made.
After the exchange, Ethan and Daphne walk off screen toward an island away from the mainland where something goes down.

Both Megan and Will have been asked a million times if they have any idea what happened on the island. They've mostly demured, for good reason.
I think it's amazing that the audience doesn't really have an answer, because I think that's part of what Mike's magic is. What he likes to do is present a situation to an audience and let them decide how they feel about it instead of picking for them and telling them and i think that is such a special way to view something and it's so rare these days i think i kind of thought of it in like as empirical a way as it was filmed where i was kind of like well they they went over there, and it's not really about the details of what happened.
It's like that in itself is an event. It's like it's a betrayal of sorts.
It's a thing that happened between them. I have my idea.
But yeah, I think I'm kind of like, I don't even want to say what it is, because I feel like it should be, you know, it should belong to everyone in that way.

Other people, weirdly, did seem to have quite strong opinions about exactly what happened and would offer them up and be like, okay, cool, man.

Megan even turned the question around on me.

What do you think?

We eventually decided to respect Mike White's vision and let the scene lie. In any way, as Dan Savage pointed out to me, the scene basically says it all on its own.
They fucked. Yeah.
They fucked. There's no ambiguity there.
There's no ambiguity on whether Daphne fucked Ethan and Ethan fucked Daphne at that moment. It's brilliantly staged and directed where Daphne looks back over her shoulder at Ethan, who has stopped walking toward the little island, this separate place, right? Separate from the mainland, separate from the relationship, right? And she looks back at him and he looks forward and sort of his head tilts back a little bit toward the mainland where his wife is.
And then he takes a step forward. He crosses the Rubicon at that moment and follows Daphne.
Dan also said that any uncertainty viewers have about what went down on the island actually says more about us than it does about the show. I think there's a lot of people out there who are so invested in monogamy, and we're invested by this point in these characters.
And we're raised to believe that cheating is the worst thing that someone could do to somebody else. And so we want to give people every benefit of the doubt if we like them that they didn't.
And people really liked Ethan. I think people liked Ethan more than Daphne.
Ethan was incredibly sympathetic and incredibly hot. And people wanted to exonerate Ethan at that moment.
And it was people telling on themselves in a way and saying something about themselves and not taking in what Mike White was showing them. Not telling them, not let's go fuck.
I'm going to fuck you now. We fuck now.
But what he was showing them, which is they not only did they fuck, but they fucked and Ethan fucking Daphne saved Ethan and Harper's relationship. I sometimes have a bad reputation among other people in the sex and relationship advice racket because I will sometimes give people permission to cheat.
In circumstances where a sexless relationship, they did their level best, they went to couples counseling, nothing has improved. I sometimes think cheating is the least worst option for all involved.
If a person can discreetly get their needs met elsewhere and take the burden off the relationship, I call it do what you need to do to stay married and stay sane. Sometimes you have to do what you need to do to stay married and stay sane.

And there was an echo of that for me in Daphne's speech.

A mystery. It's kind of sexy.

I'm a mystery to myself, honestly.

I surprise myself all the time.

I think you just do whatever you have to do

not to feel like a victim of life. Just use your imagination.
Daphne's right. You know, a couple is a story.
It's a myth that two people create. Who you are as a couple is a story you tell each other about each other, but it's also a story that you tell together other people about who you are.
And we're constantly revising that story. And as Daphne says, as Mike White says, that other person we're in the relationship with is a mystery to us, but we are also a mystery to ourselves.
In regard to Daphne and Cameron, Dan often talks about tolyamory, a word that he coined. Tolyamory is a portmanteau, a combination of the words polyamory and tolerate, as in tolerating a partner's cheating.
Polyamory means many loves, poly-many-amory love. It's an awkward term because poly comes from Greek and amor comes from the Latin.
And tolly amory means turning a blind eye, you put up with it. You tolerate your love's infidelities and turn a blind eye.

And early you think just Daphne is Tali.

And then you realize that they're both Tali.

That Daphne reasserts her agency and control and sense of self by giving herself permission to do what she knows Cameron is doing or has done. I'm curious who cheated first, right? The two couples might be the most explicit example of Mike White exploring gender dynamics in season two.
But there's another major storyline that gets into it as well. The DeGrasso family.
Flirting is one of the pleasures of life. Do you actually think you have a chance with any of these women? Oh, don't be rude.
I'm just saying, you're 80 years old. Oh, I'm still a man.
And I get older and older, but the women I desire remain young. Natural, right? You can relate to that.
If Daphne and Ethan's little moment on the island is an example of cheating gone right, then you could see the story of Dominic DeGrasso, played by Michael Imperioli, as its foil, cheating gone very wrong. My dad has cheated on my mom a lot, and he just got caught again.
Yikes for him. Moderation in all things, right?

Including moderation.

And Dominic, that character, has no self-control, can't moderate.

That tells us by inference that however much a dog Cameron is,

he can self-regulate in a way that Dominic can't.

And therefore, Cameron's relationship with Daphne can survive the weight of the infidelities that Cameron commits. And Dominic's relationship can't survive.
I don't fucking care, Tom. I've wasted enough of my life.
I don't want you calling me anymore. Go fuck yourself, you fucking piece of fucking shit.
What for, that storyline is talking about is really the transmission of a kind of toxic masculinity from generation to generation, and how that kind of male toxicity can be passed on. You might say that Dominic's womanizing was passed on to him by his father, Bert, played by the great F.
Murray Abraham. You're blaming me for your situation? That's rich.
Do you think you are so discreet? Do you? I mean, how many nights did I hear mom cry herself to sleep? Get real. And now, it's trickling further down the family tree to affect Dominic's son, Albie, played by Adam DeMarco.
I got the chance to talk to Adam about the role. The character's half Italian, specifically, and I'm like, I'm half Italian.
And then his name's like Albie DeGrazzo, and I'm like, Adam DeMarco. I'm like, even that alone, I was like, okay, this feels like I have my in.
And can you speak Italian? No, I can I can't speak Italian. When I was there, I learned a few important phrases, like, sono intolerante, lactose.
I'm lactose intolerant. Important.
Yeah. Adam knew that he'd be acting opposite two giants, Michael Imperioli and F.
Murray Abraham. But he was also, and maybe helpfully so, oblivious to some of the hype.
I was lucky in the sense that I hadn't seen Amadeus or The Sopranos heading there. And I was like, well, I'm definitely not going to start now because I don't want to be more intimidated than I already am.
So I was kind of able to just kind of see them as my dad and my grandpa without any other images. I mean, I have seen Amadeus now, and I'm currently watching The Sopranos, so I'm like retroactively freaking out.
But at the time, it kind of worked out nicely. But I haven't seen like a lot of stuff.
Like I hadn't even seen The Godfather, which I have seen now. Would you say Sopranos lives up to its reputation? Yeah, and The Godfather, and Amadeus.

During the shoot, Adam saw Albie as trying to evolve

beyond the chauvinism that defined his dad and grandpa.

But Albie is, after all, still a Degrasso at heart.

I think Albie was trying to learn from their mistakes

or right the course of their history.

But also I just tried to play with their alikeness as well as their differences yeah Michael wears sunglasses a lot I noticed in scenes and so I was like I'm not gonna wear my sunglasses it's like I don't want to be like my dad and then in the last episode when I'm like facing him I like put my sunglasses on the end. It's just like a little thing for me to play with.
Just picking moments to borrow similarities and then also carve out differences. Adam knows that some people see Albie as a kind of performative feminist or even an incel type.
You know, the kind of guy who makes out like he's considerate and caring, but then resents women behind their back because they don't appreciate him the way he wants to be appreciated. Still, Adam wanted to bring out Albie's nice side.
I think I just tried to play him as a good guy or neutral good, I guess, if there's like an alignment chart. But then near the end of the season, I guess he shows more sides to him,

like blackmailing his dad.

Moving towards like neutral evil.

Yeah.

Wait, chaotic.

Or lawful evil or I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

One of them.

Girls always complain that guys aren't nice,

but then if they find a nice guy,

they're not always interested.

But I just don't want to be like my dad, you know? I refuse to have a bad relationship with women. Albie's spiel about being a nice guy is something Dan said he hears from dudes all the time.
Straight guys will complain to me about how the girls will tell you they want the nice, respectable, considerate guy who's very conscientious about consent. But then the guy they run off with or they're turned on by is the low-hot asshole.
This dynamic unfolds in a subplot between Albie and two other characters. Portia, played by Hayley Lou Richardson, and Jack, played by Leo Woodall.
I did sit down with Hayley to talk about her role as Portia, a character that for her sometimes felt a little too close to home. The first time I met Mike in person, we were getting called in to meet Mike and talk about characters and everything, and me and Adam got called in at the same time.
It was my second day, I think, in Sicily, and I was staying in an apartment, like maybe a 10-minute walk from the Four Seasons. I didn't know how to get places, and I like was jet-lagged, and it was pouring rain, and my Google Maps wasn't working with the small Sicilian streets, and I was like walking down this one road, and it was a one-way street, and I couldn't see, and I didn't have an umbrella, and then a car almost hit me, and then all of a sudden I got to the Four Seasons and I was like soaking wet and like pitiful and crying.
And then I went in this room and I met Mike and I was trying to like be all like, oh, everything's great. But then I had kind of a breakdown and I was telling him this whole story that I just told you.
and he just looked at me, he just watched and listened,

and then he was like,

oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were doing a bit as Portia.

And I was like, whoa!

Like, it just hit really deep, because then that's when I realized, like, whoa, am I Portia.

Early on in the season, Albie develops a crush on Portia, who's staying at the White Lotus as Tanya's assistant. How was your day? Uh, pretty grim, actually.
I feel like if I murdered my boss, I could argue it was euthanasia. But soon, Albie has to compete for Portia's attention with Jack, a flirty British bad boy who has his own devious intentions.
All right, well then, if you want an adventure, huh? Stick with me. Because I know how to have fun in the sandbox.
If you know what I mean. I don't know what you mean by that.
I'll teach her. As the episodes unfold, Albie and Portia end up going their separate ways.
Portia on her adventure with Jack and Albie on his own sexual journey with Lucia, the Italian sex worker. What would it take for him to let you go? Money.
He says I owe him. In essence, Albie gets scammed.
again Mike White and his genius Albie does get

excited I owe him. In essence, Albie gets scammed.
Again, Mike White and his genius, Albie does get exploited and taken advantage of in a way where you can understand why he might become more like his father and more like his grandfather. Where his naivete, his wishful thinking, his desire to be the white knight and the savior and see himself in that role winds up costing him and his father dearly.
And it's almost as if his father coughs up the 50 grand knowing that they're going to get fucked out of the money. And he's in a way purchasing his son's disillusionment or disabusing his son of his disillusionment at that moment

when he hands over the money.

But it also, you can see Albie becoming Dominic in 20, 30 years, being very cynical from here

on out about who women are.

This arc for Albie, his evolution from sensitivity to disillusion, culminates in the final episode

when Albie and Portia have their final run-in at the airport.

Portia?

Hi.

Thank you. His evolution from sensitivity to disillusion culminates in the final episode when Albie and Portia have their final run-in at the airport.
Portia? Hi. Hey.
Albie briefly reconnects in the airport with Portia, who's just gone through an incredibly traumatic experience. You worry for both of them.
He's changed, and you can see her sense the change in him. And you can see that she's not more attracted to him now because, oh, here's the safe, respectful boy as opposed to the asshole I ran off with.
But you can see her almost picking up some sense that in him now is the seed of the exploitative, misogynistic asshole that she needs a man to be to arouse her. Yes.
And Mike White packs so much into that moment. It's like a collapsed star.
You get no sense that they're going to redeem or save each other. You get a sense now that they're both in a position where if they did get together, they would destroy each other.
Can I get your number? Yeah, sure. You could just put it in.
Yeah, give me yours. Yeah.
So the Degrassos end up basically where they started, with Albie even more like his dad and grandpa. But what about the foursome? I mean, Ethan, he sort of like boils over in the final episodes.
It felt like... A little sharp again.
He starts in one place. He finishes in a completely different place.
And patiently building towards the scenes where I was allowed to detonate a bit more, I guess. Like, that was fun.
So I think in a weird way, it's not like a full catharsis. But he's also just been losing and losing and losing and losing, you know, throughout the series up to that point.

And that's kind of like around there, I think, in the final episode is where he starts to maybe win a little bit.

Like he's a little bit more on top than he was.

I guess some of his dignity back, let's say.

The last we see of Ethan and Harper, they're lounging in the airport, wrapped in each other's arms.

Mount Etna looms behind them, spewing lava in a way that feels very climactic. I often found the image of Mount Etna quite surreal for some reason.
Like it looms so large over that city, sometimes it would erupt and the locals would just be like, yeah, don't worry about that. That's what it does.
Whoa. Is that a volcano? No, no.
What Harper and Ethan have learned from Daphne and Cameron by the end of season two is that some distance, some separation, even some amount of betrayal is better for the relationship. Something to bridge, something to forgive.
The last time you see Ethan and Harper, they're cuddling and obviously reconnected. So Ethan and Harper received something incredibly valuable during their stay at the White Lotus, a couple's therapy of sorts.
Whether they're healed for good or if it's just a Band-Aid, who's to say? But there's been healing. I wonder how Harper feels a month from the end of, a month after they got back from that vacation and whether self-doubt is corroding that connection again.
As for Daphne and Cameron, we talked about what they're doing right in their relationship, but there is one moment that, how shall we say, complicates things. I have this trainer in the city, Lawrence.
He's so handsome. He has blonde hair and these big blue eyes.
I spend more time with him than Cameron sometimes. Such a cutie.
Want to see a pic? This is just a picture of your kids. Is it? Whoopsie.
That's a time bomb. That's a long fuse ticking time bomb.
That's a me and 23 test away from that kid 10, 15 years in the future having a crisis of identity that his parents burdened him with. that was an unfair consequence for a child of his parents' conduct that he had no control over.
And I sit with that at times because I'm like, you know, cheating happens and we should be able to get past it. But sometimes cheating can have long-term consequences, not just for the people in the relationship where there was infidelity, but for all around them.

And I think White signaled that brilliantly by gesturing toward this child who quite clearly is not Cameron's.

And Cameron has like weird fucked up feelings about that he's suppressing.

Can you give the phone to Grammy, please?

I want daddy.

Cameron?

Hey, Cam. Where's Daddy? Cameron? Mommy.
Cameron! Next time on the White Lotus Official Podcast, we'll be looking at everyone's favorite White Lotus character, one the gays couldn't stop trying to murder, Tanya.

He called them the evil gays.

And I was like, really?

They're bad?

They're really bad?

And Mike goes, yes, Jennifer, because let me tell you something.

Gay men don't always want to be the best friend.

Do you know how badly gay men want to play evil people. The White Lotus Podcast is a production of HBO and Campside Media.
This episode was hosted by me, Evan Ross Katz, and produced by Natalia Winkleman. Our associate producer is Aaliyah Papes.

Fact-checking by Gray Lanta.

At Campside Media, our executive producer is Josh Dean.

Editing and sound design by Iwan Laitremuwen.

Special thanks to Michael Gluckstadt,

Alison Cohen-Sorokach,

and Kenya Reyes from the HBO podcast team.

Thank you for listening, and I'll see you next time. The official White Lotus podcast is sponsored by Abercrombie & Fitch.
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