By Variety | Created at 2025-03-17 03:29:16 | Updated at 2025-03-17 10:00:54
8 hours ago
SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Season 3, Episode 5 of “The White Lotus,” now streaming on Max.
Things get just a little wild for Laurie (Carrie Coon), Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Kate (Leslie Bibb) in the latest episode of “The White Lotus.”
After leaving the resort in Thailand and going out for a night of drinking and dancing at a club with a group of Russian guys — their dedicated wellness instructor, Valentin (Arnas Fedaravičius), and accompanied by his two friends — Laurie unexpectedly finds herself having a blast. She goes all out with the trio of Russians, at one point even taking her top off in a pool back at the hotel. There’s notably a different energy to Laurie after being the odd-woman-out throughout the season.
“It was important that she be uninhibited when dancing,” Coon tells Variety. “She’s drunk, and that leads to inhibition, which informs her choices later on.”
Up until this point, the show has been slowly building steam and stewing in ambiguity, as viewers have waited to see how the storylines will eventually converge. But this episode is when everything begins to explode for “The White Lotus,” with the three women — and separately, partying siblings Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and Lochlan (Sam Nivola) — going all out.
Monaghan infused Jaclyn with a sense of “complete abandon” in her movement. She says: “She was really in her element. I had a spirit animal for Jaclyn, and she’s a bit of a butterfly. She’s very lively and colorful and likes to make a statement, but there’s something about her that knows that life is short-lived.”
Coon recalls how “The White Lotus” creator Mike White was able to show each of the women how their character would dance on the spot, and “was really tuned into how everybody would show up in the moment.”
“Often as women in this industry, you’re just sitting around on a couch talking about a man,” Coon says. “To be able to use our bodies in that way was really thrilling. Leslie does physical comedy, Michelle does action movies. All three of us recognize the lack of interest in the industry, and how much fun it was to be fully expressed in that way.”
Kate — who in a previous episode revealed herself to be a church-going Trump voter — isn’t quite feeling it this episode, though, and assumes the role of sober-ish caretaker. When Laurie and Jaclyn invite the men back to the villa, Kate says: “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”
“It felt important to me that it came out of jealousy of these three guys when they came back,” Bibb says. “You know when everybody’s at the max, she was like a Mama bear with these two.”
While the ladies let loose in this episode, that doesn’t mean their competitiveness from previous episodes doesn’t find its way into their drunk interactions. When two of the Russian men talk about ballet training, Jaclyn singles Kate out as the only person who’s not a trained dancer. After they all dance together, Valentin then singles Laurie out as a “sexy dancer” over Jaclyn — a huge moment for her confidence.
“It’s another one of those moments where you see two of the friends connecting about something that leaves the other one out,” Coon says. “There’s no way Jaclyn doesn’t take Laurie being a sexy dancer personally. No one’s talking about Jaclyn being sexy. Maybe we just take it for granted because she’s a television star.”
Jaclyn’s social capital as the famous person in the group — and the one paying for the whole trip — also comes into play within this dynamic. By comparison, Coon sees Laurie as someone who doesn’t want to admit the loss of her own economic and social power.
“Her marriage is falling apart, she’s struggling with her teenage daughter, she didn’t get a promotion at work, and to admit that to her friends, who are outwardly very successful, would be a huge blow to her ego,” Coon says. “Owning it and asking for support would actually be the healthiest path through this vacation, and none of the women choose it. They’re reactive, and dealing with these dynamics as they pop up from their point of view.”
This episode is full of memorable moments that were often improvised over the course of the two-night shoot, including the dancing scenes, and when the men argue with women at the club whom they obviously know well, who yell at them in Russian.
“I can’t say that we prepped in any way,” Monaghan says. “You don’t really rehearse with Mike White. He throws things out on the day, and he trusts the casting process so much that once the characters start to come alive, he really allows us to swing for the hills.”
When Laurie says goodnight to the Russian men, she sticks her fists out like a boxer. Details like these allowed Coon to play into Laurie being the goofiest of the three, which she thinks makes her friends look down on her even more.
“She’s not quite ‘Keeping Up With the Joneses,’” Coon says. “She needed this vacation, but was not necessarily prepared for it — and maybe wasn’t even in a financial position to be doing it. She just really needed to get away from her life, just with haplessly packed luggage and a bad nail color.”
Throughout the season, Jaclyn and Kate have been pushing Laurie to get out and date, and she takes an interest in Valentin, dancing with him and flirting throughout the episode. Jaclyn outwardly boasts about her own happy marriage and happy life, so the thought of her swooping in on Valentin doesn’t ever register as a possibility to Laurie. But in a surprise turn at the end of Episode 5, Jaclyn sleeps with Valentin after everyone else has gone to bed, shivving Laurie in the process.
“It could have been a very positive turning point in the vacation for them,” Coon says. “It is a reclamation of their youth, it is fun and sexy. And it feels like the vacation they all wanted. Instead, we have what is perceived in Laurie’s eyes as a betrayal. It’s also a reinforcement of patterns of behavior and a question of when we return to friend groups from our youth: Do we just default to our position? Or are we able to re-assert ourselves?”
Despite the betrayal, Monaghan doesn’t view Jaclyn as ill-intentioned in the moment.
“She doesn’t see it as a betrayal to the ladies,” Monaghan says. “It’s not an affair, it’s just an infidelity in her mind. I think she just, frankly, hits the ‘fuck it’ button and decides to have a good time. And I think it’s something that she’s probably going to be excited to tell the girls about the next morning.”
