Episode 4: Sex and Sicily with Guest Dan Savage

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Speaker 8 Hi.

Speaker 8 You okay?

Speaker 9 Haven't really seemed like yourself the past couple days.

Speaker 9 Work stuff?

Speaker 6 What is it?

Speaker 6 You wanna know?

Speaker 6 I think

Speaker 9 You think what?

Speaker 5 Cameron and Harper?

Speaker 6 Cameron Harper, what?

Speaker 10 Maybe something happened.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Obviously, relationships are at the heart of both seasons. The desire to explore human connection is basically woven into Mike White's DNA.

Speaker 11 But many see sexual and romantic politics as being particularly central to season two.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 5 Cheers,

Speaker 8 we made it.

Speaker 12 Welcome to the White House in Sicily.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 13 You made my Italian dream come true. I feel like Monica Viti, I really do.

Speaker 11 But the island can also be seen as a repository of machismo and traditional gender roles.

Speaker 5 Hey, what is with these head things?

Speaker 5 We keep seeing them everywhere.

Speaker 8 Tessa di Moro. Tessa di Moro?

Speaker 14 Well, the story is, a moor came here a long time ago and seduced a local girl.

Speaker 14 But then she found out that he had a wife and children back home.

Speaker 14 So because he lied to her, she cut his head off.

Speaker 11 It's the perfect setting for Mike White to explore some of the issues he does best. Seduction, desire, suspicion, and betrayal.

Speaker 10 Stop flirting with my wife. I'm not a fool.

Speaker 10 Dude,

Speaker 5 are you being serious?

Speaker 10 I know what you're doing, man.

Speaker 5 Are you losing it?

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 5 I loved the first season, of course, but it was really the second season that knocked me flat.

Speaker 11 Dan Savage is a sex and relationships advice columnist and podcaster. And he, like me, loves the white lotus.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 5 You know, sometimes you write a sex advice column, you talk to straight people about sex.

Speaker 5 Every once in a while, you get somebody saying, what do you know about straight people or straight sex or straight relationships?

Speaker 5 And 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 We're swimming in straight people in a way that straight people are not swimming in gay people.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 11 The storyline Dan was most enraptured by was the Foresome: Harper, Ethan, Daphne, and Cameron.

Speaker 11 As the season unfolds, their dynamic becomes a stage on which Mike White can play out contemporary ideas and anxieties about love and sex.

Speaker 11 Like, what does it look like to be in a long-term relationship these days? What turns people on? What keeps them connected?

Speaker 8 So, you're like playing games with them.

Speaker 9 We both do it.

Speaker 6 It's like hide and seek.

Speaker 9 Keeps things interesting.

Speaker 11 Obviously, we wanted to hear about all of this from the actors.

Speaker 7 Okay, I'm recording. Hello.

Speaker 11 Will Sharp told me that when he got the part of Ethan, he hadn't acted in about four years.

Speaker 11 He'd spent that period behind the camera, directing a movie, and then a different HBO project, a mini-series called Landscapers. If you haven't seen it, you have to check it out.

Speaker 11 Ethan is a recently wealthy tech entrepreneur who's cautiously exploring the benefits of the lavish lifestyle newly afforded to him.

Speaker 10 I mean, nothing much has changed, to be honest. Nice to be able to help people, I guess.

Speaker 11 Will was excited about the role, particularly about Ethan's character arc.

Speaker 7 It felt like in the earlier episodes it was about holding my nerve, not giving away too much, and kind of somehow trying to

Speaker 7 portray like

Speaker 7 an internalized agony and an internalized internalized sort of conflict. That's what I liked about him was that there was a journey for him.

Speaker 11 For Will, it was also meaningful that Ethan was non-white.

Speaker 7 Ethan's ethnicity, I think, was something that I had on my mind quite a lot, actually.

Speaker 7 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?

Speaker 7 And there's like a sort of weird disconnect within himself, like that 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.

Speaker 7 And it's just because of, I guess, what he looks like and what his heritage is.

Speaker 6 Is that what happens when you're rich for too long?

Speaker 12 Your brain just atrophies.

Speaker 13 I mean, they seem happy.

Speaker 6 No way.

Speaker 6 It's a front.

Speaker 8 It's good to have, you know,

Speaker 10 diverse friends, I guess.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I think we're their diverse friends. They're white-passing diverse friends.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you're right.

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 9 Yeah,

Speaker 9 I think the energy was sort of intact right from the beginning.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 7 And baby, thanks for coming out with me.

Speaker 2 I love you.

Speaker 11 But this is the Mike Whiteiverse, after all, so obviously it's a lot more complex than that.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 9 And they can do that in a number of ways.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 6 Why let them have all the fun?

Speaker 11 For a while, after the actors arrived in Sicily, scenes of the two couples together kept getting pushed back.

Speaker 11 They'd get their call times, go to hair and makeup, get in costume, and then have to go right back to their rooms.

Speaker 7 Every time we went in,

Speaker 7 something would happen, like it would start raining, or there'd be like a wind storm or something and and it was it was almost like a joke that every time us four were called to set it would be like oh well we have to

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 I feel like that was part of the kind of slingshottiness of Ethan's

Speaker 7 trajectory where for so much of the series you're just winding him up.

Speaker 10 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 him within a week.

Speaker 15 Cameron, rude.

Speaker 10 You have a bad case of something called mimetic desire.

Speaker 15 What's that?

Speaker 10 If someone with higher status and you want something, it means it's more likely that you will want it too.

Speaker 8 You do not have higher status than me.

Speaker 10 Not then, maybe.

Speaker 11 Amidst all this winding up, Daphne is busy doing something else.

Speaker 2 Scheming.

Speaker 11 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 in there overnight at the palazzo.

Speaker 9 We're in the pool and I'm trying to convince her to stay another night and then I

Speaker 9 say like, you know, can I hop out and call, can I tell Cam first?

Speaker 9 He has really intense FOMO and also abandonment issues, so it's just really funny to tell him we're living it up at some sick palazzo.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 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?

Speaker 9 And I loved how down Mike was to let her be like a little freak in that moment, you know? Like just energetically like

Speaker 9 enjoying the game. To me, it really was this little like

Speaker 9 gold nugget, you know, a window into her complicated brain.

Speaker 11 Scenes like this drive home a point that Megan knows intuitively. Daphne is devious.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 9 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?

Speaker 9 She was playing the game the whole time. And that was the one thing that Mike

Speaker 9 was really specific about before we started shooting was that she's not a victim of her circumstances at all.

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 5 Esther Perell, who wrote Mating in Captivity, very wisely said, the paradox of desire in a long-term relationship is to desire is to want.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 Harper and Ethan's relationship almost seems like a deposition at all times.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 6 What's with the boner? Yeah, fair question.

Speaker 16 I was drinking off.

Speaker 2 Oh, oh, oh, oh.

Speaker 2 Why?

Speaker 5 Harper has real illusions about what her relationship is and is very smug about what her relationship is and what it means.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 12 They have a twisted relationship,

Speaker 6 and we are fine. Compared to them,

Speaker 6 we are fine.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 They're maintaining their sense of individuality. And part of what I saw in season two was Daphne and Cameron almost being a stand-in,

Speaker 5 a more dysfunctional version of the kind of gay male relationships you often see, which are either explicitly open or tacitly open.

Speaker 5 And it helps strengthen the relationship rather than weaken the relationship, which

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Then there's no mystery. There's no eroticism in their relationship.
They're not fucking.

Speaker 11 All this simmering stress finally comes to a boil in the finale, featuring what is probably the most debated scene of season two.

Speaker 11 Of course, I'm talking about the exchange between Daphne and Ethan on the beach.

Speaker 9 Have you been over there yet to Salabella? I do want to go before we leave.

Speaker 6 Looks so pretty.

Speaker 6 Come on.

Speaker 12 Walk with me.

Speaker 11 Let's rewind and break down what happens right before.

Speaker 11 Ethan confronts Harper about sleeping with Cameron.

Speaker 10 I was in the water and you guys are 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?

Speaker 11 Harper admits to kissing him.

Speaker 10 All right, I don't know what the fuck happened, but one thing that I do know is he tried to fuck you.

Speaker 6 Where are you going?

Speaker 11 Which triggers Ethan to storm off and attack Cameron. Ethan then finds Daphne on the beach and shares his suspicions.

Speaker 6 I don't think you have anything to worry about.

Speaker 9 I mean, we never really know what goes on in people's minds or what they do, right?

Speaker 9 You spend every second with somebody,

Speaker 9 there's still this part that's a mystery.

Speaker 9 You don't have to know everything to love someone.

Speaker 11 Megan and Will told me about shooting this scene.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 It's like finally coming out of him. So I did a take where I was finding what she was saying like really affecting and sort of emotional.
And then

Speaker 7 Mike was like, yeah,

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 After all of this, like, sound and fury, we arrive at a point of stillness.

Speaker 9 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

Speaker 9 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

Speaker 9 deliberate choice in the way that she chooses to respond. And that scene was

Speaker 9 her doing that in a nutshell.

Speaker 7 All of the characters in that series were one way or another trying to find some kind of connection and Ethan

Speaker 7 was not an exception. And in a fucked up way,

Speaker 7 actually, 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.

Speaker 11 After the exchange, Ethan and Daphne walk off screen toward an island away from the mainland where

Speaker 11 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 demurred.

Speaker 17 for good reason.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 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

Speaker 9 a special way to view something. And it's so rare these days.

Speaker 7 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 went over there and it's not really about the details of what happened.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 9 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,

Speaker 9 you know, it should belong to everyone in that way.

Speaker 7 Other people, weirdly, did seem to have like quite strong opinions about exactly what happened and would like offer them up or be like, okay, cool, man, whatever.

Speaker 11 Megan even turned the question around on me.

Speaker 9 What do you think?

Speaker 11 We eventually decided to respect Mike White's vision and let the scene lie. And anyway, as Dan Savage pointed out to me, the scene basically says it all on its own.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 Separate from the mainland, separate from the relationship, right?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 6 He crosses the Rubicon at that moment and follows Daphne.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 5 I think there's a lot of people out there who who are so invested in monogamy, and we're invested by this point in these characters.

Speaker 5 And we're raised to believe that cheating is the worst thing that someone could do to somebody else.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Ethan was incredibly sympathetic and incredibly hot.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 taking in what Mike White was showing them. Not telling them, not, let's go fuck.
I'm going to fuck you now. We fucked now.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I sometimes have a bad reputation among other people in the the sex and relationship advice racket because I will sometimes give people permission to cheat.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 9 A mystery. It's kind of sexy.
I'm a mystery to myself, honestly. I surprise myself all the time.

Speaker 9 I think you just do whatever you have to do, not to feel like a victim of life.

Speaker 9 You just use your imagination.

Speaker 5 Daphne's right. You know, a couple is a story.
It's a myth that two people create.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And as Daphne says, as Mike White says,

Speaker 5 that other person we're in the relationship with is a mystery to us, but we are also a mystery to ourselves.

Speaker 11 In regard to Daphne and Cameron, Dan often talks about tolyamory, a word that he coined.

Speaker 11 Tolyamory is a portmanteau, a combination of the words polyamory and tolerate, as in tolerating a partner's cheating.

Speaker 5 Polyamory means many loves. Polymeny, Amory, love.
It's an awkward term because Poly comes from Greek and Emory comes from the Latin. And Pali Amory means you turning a blind eye.
You put up with it.

Speaker 5 You tolerate your love's infidelities and turn a blind eye. And early you think just Daphne is Tolly.
And then you realize that they're both Tolly.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 14 Flirting is one of the pleasures of life.

Speaker 10 Do you actually think you have a chance with any of these women, Hole?

Speaker 2 Don't be rude.

Speaker 10 I'm just saying, you're 80 years old.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Cheating gone very wrong.

Speaker 7 My dad

Speaker 4 has cheated on my mom a lot,

Speaker 4 and he just got caught again.

Speaker 8 Yikes for him.

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Speaker 5 Moderation in all things, right? Including moderation. And Dominic, that character, has no self-control, can't moderate.

Speaker 5 That tells us by inference that however much a dog Cameron is, he can self-regulate in a way that Dominic can't.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I've wasted enough of my life. I don't want you calling me anymore.
Go fuck yourself, you fucking piece of fucking shit.

Speaker 5 What for me, 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.

Speaker 11 You might say that Dominic's womanizing was passed on to him by his father, Bert, played by the great F. Murray Abraham.

Speaker 8 You're blaming me for your situation, that's rich.

Speaker 8 Do you think you were so discreet?

Speaker 14 Do you?

Speaker 8 I mean, how many nights did I hear mom cry herself to sleep?

Speaker 5 Get real.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 4 The character's half Italian, specifically, and I'm like, I'm half Italian. And then

Speaker 4 his name's like Albie DiGrazzo, and I'm like, Adam DeMarco. I'm like, even that alone, I was like, okay, this feels like I have my in.

Speaker 11 And can you speak Italian?

Speaker 4 I, no, I can't speak Italian. When I was there, I learned a few important phrases like

Speaker 4 sono intolerante, latosio.

Speaker 2 I'm lactose intolerant. Important.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But at the time, I kind of worked out nicely. But I haven't seen like a lot of stuff, like, I hadn't even seen The Godfather,

Speaker 4 which I have seen now.

Speaker 11 Would you say Sopranos lives up to its reputation?

Speaker 4 Yeah, and The Godfather, and Amadeus.

Speaker 11 During the shoot, Adam saw Albi as trying to evolve beyond the chauvinism that defined his dad and grandpa.

Speaker 2 But Albi is, after all, still a degrasso at heart.

Speaker 4 I think Albi was trying to

Speaker 4 learn from their mistakes or write the course of their history. But also, I just tried to play with their alikeness as well as their differences.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Michael wears sunglasses a lot, I noticed, in scenes. And so I was like, I'm not going to wear my sunglasses.
It's like, I don't want to be like my dad.

Speaker 4 And then in the last episode when I'm like facing him, I like...

Speaker 4 put my sunglasses on at 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.

Speaker 11 Adam knows that some people see Albi as a kind of performative feminist or even an incel type.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 So, Adam wanted to bring out Albi's nice set.

Speaker 4 I think I just try to play him as a good guy or

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 Thanks for it's like neutral evil, yeah, wait, can you get a little bit of a little bit of a lot of evil? Or I don't know, yeah, yeah, yeah, one of them

Speaker 4 girls always complain that guys aren't nice, but then

Speaker 4 if they find a nice guy, they're not always interested,

Speaker 5 I just don't want to be like my dad,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 I refuse to have a bad relationship with women.

Speaker 11 Albie's spiel about being a nice guy is something Dan said he hears from dudes all the time.

Speaker 5 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 sh-hot asshole.

Speaker 11 This dynamic unfolds in a subplot between Albie and two other characters, Portia, played by Haley Lou Richardson, and Jack, played by Leo Woodall.

Speaker 11 I did sit down with Haley to talk about her role as Portia, a character that for her sometimes felt a little too close to home.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 and then I went in this room and I met Mike And I was trying to like be all like, oh, everything's great.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 2 whoa

Speaker 15 like it just hit really deep because then that's when I realized like whoa am I Porsche

Speaker 11 Early on in the season, Albie develops a crush on Porsche, who's staying at the White Lotus as Tanya's assistant.

Speaker 6 How's your day?

Speaker 2 Uh, pretty grim, actually.

Speaker 15 I feel like if I murdered my boss, I could argue it was euthanasia.

Speaker 11 But soon, Alby has to compete for Portia's attention with Jack, a flirty British bad boy who has his own devious intentions.

Speaker 8 All right, well then,

Speaker 7 if you want an adventure, huh?

Speaker 8 Stick with me.

Speaker 12 Because I know I have to have fun in the sandbox.

Speaker 8 If you know what I mean.

Speaker 15 I don't know what you mean by that.

Speaker 8 I'll teach ya.

Speaker 11 As the episodes unfold, Albi and Portia end up going their separate ways. Portia on her adventure with Jack, and Albi on his own sexual journey with Lucia, the Italian sex worker.

Speaker 4 What would it take for him to let you go?

Speaker 6 Money.

Speaker 6 He says I owe him.

Speaker 11 In essence, Albi gets scammed.

Speaker 5 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,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 purchasing his son's disillusionment or disabusing his son of his disillusionment at that moment when he hands over the money.

Speaker 5 But it also, you can see Alby becoming Dominic in 20, 30 years, being very cynical from here on out about who women are.

Speaker 11 This arc for Albi, his evolution from sensitivity to disillusion, culminates in the final episode when Alby and Portia have their final run-in at the airport.

Speaker 6 Portia?

Speaker 6 Hi.

Speaker 6 Hey.

Speaker 5 Albi briefly reconnects in the airport with Portia, who's just gone through an incredibly traumatic experience. You worry

Speaker 5 for both of them. He's changed, and you can see her sense the change in him.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 But you can see her almost picking up some sense that in him now is the seed of

Speaker 5 the exploitative, misogynistic

Speaker 5 asshole that she needs a man to be to arouse her. Yes.
And Mike White packs so much into that moment. It's like

Speaker 5 a collapsed star.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 15 Can I get your number?

Speaker 6 Yeah, sure.

Speaker 15 You could just put it in.

Speaker 4 Yeah, give me yours. Yeah.

Speaker 11 So the Degrasso's end up basically where they started, with Albi even more like his dad and grandpa. But what about the foursome?

Speaker 7 I mean, Ethan, he sort of like boils over in the final episodes, it felt like.

Speaker 11 Will Sharp again.

Speaker 7 He starts in one place, he finishes in a completely different place. and patiently building towards the scenes where I was allowed to sort of detonate a bit more, I guess.
Like, that was fun.

Speaker 7 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

Speaker 7 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.
And it gets some of his dignity back, let's say.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 7 I often found the image of Mount Aetna 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.

Speaker 7 That's what it does.

Speaker 6 Whoa.

Speaker 6 Is that a volcano? Mount Etna.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 for the relationship. Something to bridge, something to forgive.
The last time you see Ethan and Harper, they're cuddling and obviously reconnected.

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 11 But there's been healing.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 11 As for Daphne and Cameron, we talked about what they're doing right in their relationship, but there is one moment that

Speaker 11 complicates things.

Speaker 9 I have this trainer in the city,

Speaker 9 Lawrence.

Speaker 9 He's so handsome.

Speaker 8 He has blonde hair and nice, like, big blue eyes.

Speaker 9 I spend more time with him than Cameron sometimes.

Speaker 9 Such a cutie.

Speaker 12 Want to see Pick?

Speaker 5 This is just a picture of your kids.

Speaker 6 Is it?

Speaker 9 Whoopsie.

Speaker 5 That's a time bomb. That's a long fuse ticking time bomb.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 9 Can you give the phone to Grammy, please? I want the

Speaker 9 Cameron?

Speaker 6 Hey, Cam.

Speaker 9 Cameron?

Speaker 9 Bobby.

Speaker 9 Cameron.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 16 He called them the evil gays.

Speaker 5 And I was like, really?

Speaker 13 They're bad? They're really bad?

Speaker 16 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?

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Fact-checking by Gray Atlanta. At Campside Media, our executive producer is Josh Dean.
Editing and sound design by Ewan Lai Tramuen.

Speaker 11 Special thanks to Michael Gluckstadt, Alison Cohen-Srokach, and Kenya Reyes from the HBO podcast team. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you next time.