The reason Helena Bonham Carter quit The White Lotus? It might be the show’s endless behind-the-scenes drama. Days into filming the forthcoming fourth season, the British star has jumped ship. HBO says it’s no big deal, but it adds to the feeling that the blockbuster anthology series is plagued by chaos, writes Adam White.
Bonham Carter’s Sudden Exit
The news that the esteemed British star had exited the blockbuster fancy-pants soap opera days into filming is too juicy for words. Tales of drama behind the scenes of The White Lotus are typically drip-fed while the show is actually on the air, not before. We don’t even have a date yet for when the show will be back on screen. This is going to be a long few months.
On Saturday, the show’s backers at HBO confirmed that Bonham Carter’s role is being “rethought… rewritten and recast”, adding: “It had become apparent that the character which Mike White created for Helena Bonham Carter did not align once on set.” They made pains to insist that there was no real drama involved, with HBO, the show’s producers and White saying they were “saddened” about Bonham Carter’s exit and “very much hope to work with the legendary actress on another project soon”. Still, this isn’t exactly great.
A History of Off-Screen Turmoil
Like working-from-home or Paul Mescal, The White Lotus was one of the few good things that emerged from Covid, a series only brought to life because HBO needed a drama that could be shot in a single location while the world was locked down. White wrote the first season in just three weeks, conceptualising a frothy yet loaded eat-the-rich black comedy cum murder mystery. Critics adored it, and it was bombarded with awards.
By nature of the show’s premise – which required its stars to live together for months on end in an exotic locale – there were always rumours of behind-the-scenes hook-ups and occasional conflict. Season two stars Leo Woodall and Meghann Fahy met and fell in love, while tabloids reported that the on-screen feuding between season one’s Murray Bartlett and Jake Lacy occasionally spilled over into reality (which they both denied).
But it was with the show’s third outing last year that gossipy rumours seemed to become a gnarlier reality, with production for a Thailand-set season plagued by conflict both on and off the set. Actor Jason Isaacs seemed incapable of seeing a journalist’s dictaphone and not immediately declaring something dramatic yet vague. “It was a theatre camp, but to some extent an open prison camp,” Isaacs told The Guardian. “There are tensions and difficulties … alliances that formed and broke, romances that formed and broke, friendships that formed and broke.”
British actor Aimee Lou Wood, season three’s breakout star, told Time magazine that fact and fiction began to blur for the cast. “There’s been times that we’ve been out for dinners and people have said verbatim their lines from the show.” She expanded to The Guardian: “I don’t know whether I’d describe [filming] as fun … It was like a social experiment … in a way I will never, ever forget … Everyone involved is amazing, it’s just the circumstances are quite extreme.”
Meanwhile, Isaacs was rumoured to have fallen out with his on-screen wife Parker Posey, ambiguously telling Vulture that he “didn’t really look at her or talk to her or listen to her because I’m so much in my own tunnel”. Internet sleuths speculated that something similarly messy had occurred between Wood and her on-screen boyfriend Walton Goggins, after they unfollowed one another on social media. Neither publicly discussed the speculation, which only inflamed it. An excruciating interview with The Times saw Goggins decline to speak about Wood three separate times, before publicists pulled the plug.
Then the pair suddenly did a full-blown paired interview with Variety in which they still didn’t explain what went down, but appeared to have mended fences. “There is no feud,” Goggins said. “I adore, I love this woman madly, and she is so important to me.” The unfollowing, he added, was due to his need to retreat after production.
Possible Reasons for Bonham Carter’s Departure
Bonham Carter’s exit may have been a pre-emptive strike. White tends to write on the fly, shaping characters’ storylines during production, which only adds to the show’s general chaos. “He’d never stop refining the scene that was coming up or the scene he’d just shot,” Isaacs has said. “A lot of times he’d be shouting suggestions out from behind the camera and you’d think, ‘Is he serious?’”
As an actor more used to working on movies, where a full script is presented in advance, Bonham Carter may have balked at White’s “let’s wing it!” approach. Or, as an unnamed source told the Daily Mail, was it an on-set feud with co-star Sandra Bernhard? (Not at all, Bonham Carter’s representative insisted – they haven’t even met.) Or it was indeed as uneventful as HBO has insisted – perhaps Bonham Carter wasn’t right for the role, echoing the previous early departure of an actor several weeks into production of season three.
Concerns for Season Four
Still, it’s hard to see this as a good omen for season four. We know it’ll be set at a hotel hosting guests of the Cannes Film Festival, and that it’ll feature a typically eclectic cast (Steve Coogan, Vincent Cassel, Rosie Perez and Heather Graham are all checking in). But losing an actor like Bonham Carter, who is so richly capable of the kind of cutting camp that White Lotus best traffics in, is a bit of a blow. Likewise the earlier news that composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer – responsible for the show’s frenzied strings and memorable theme songs – has quit, following a falling out with White. “We already had our last fight for ever, I think,” he told The New York Times. “He was just saying no to anything.”
Luckily, White responded to that interview with calm and decorum. Oh wait, no he didn’t. “That was a b**** move,” White told radio host Howard Stern. “He says we feuded. I don’t think I ever had a fight with him – except for maybe some emails. It was basically me giving him notes. I don’t think he liked to go through the process of getting notes from me, or wanting revisions, because he didn’t respect me.”
Bonham Carter – who I like to imagine is sunning herself in the garden of her massive London house as we speak, tequila in hand – is presumably breathing a sigh of relief.
