In an interview with the Guardian, 61-year-old Jason described filming the show in Thailand as “theater camp, but to some extent an open prison camp,” adding at the time: “You couldn’t avoid one other. There are tensions and difficulties, I don’t know if they spilled from on-screen to off-screen, or if it would have happened anyway. There were alliances that formed and broke, romances that formed and broke, friendships that formed and broke.”
“I can’t pretend I wasn’t involved in some off-screen drama…” he went on. “There were times when things were not quite so fond. I was in some ways used to it, but within a couple of weeks my wife [who was with him on set and used to be an actor] went, ‘Some of these people are fucking mad.’ I said, ‘No, it’s just a bunch of actors away on location, love. You’ve forgotten what it’s like.’”
And in a conversation with screenwriter and producer Jonathan Nolan for Cultured, Jason’s costar Walton Goggins has reflected on his own experience on the White Lotus set — and admitted that his arguably intense acting process received a mixed reaction from the other actors, with some not understanding his choices.
In the interview, Jonathan asked Walton if he has a “philosophy” for his “approach to acting.” The two worked together on the 2024 TV series Fallout, and Jonathan added: “I love to come over and connect on set, but there are definitely times when I think, Nope, he’s fully in it. Especially on [the set of Fallout], when you’re under 20 pounds of prosthetics. Is that distance something you carry into every role?”
“If I had to call it something, it would be ‘reverence,’” Walton replied. “It’s not like I’m doing anything new — plenty of people I admire do it. It’s not method, it’s not ‘a way.’ I believe storytelling is a kind of religion. It’s its own god. I wouldn’t wear sweats to church; I’d show up looking ready to be saved. In any spiritual practice, the posture is: ‘Whatever you have for me, I’m prepared to accept it.’ I feel the same way about working in film.”
“I’ll say this. Someone I worked with on The White Lotus didn’t fully understand my process,” Walton then confessed. “My character — Rick Hatchett — he’s isolated. So during filming, I was isolated. I liked mirroring that, but it was emotionally difficult. Then, a few months into The White Lotus, Fallout premiered and started to take off. One day, this actor I was working with — nice guy, good actor — came up to me and said, ‘You’re brilliant in Fallout. Please tell me you had a good time making that.’”
“I just stared at him,” the star continued. “Because he didn’t get it. I don’t care how good you are — if you don’t understand that there’s a world beyond the script, if you don’t give yourself over to it, then you’re missing something profound in this work. This is the drug. I said: ‘No. I play a guy who’s lived for 200 years and seen the worst of humanity. Every day was fucking horrible.’ He just stared back at me like: ‘OK, wow.’”
“So, I lean into that. The people I look up to lean into that. And this guy — again, great actor — just couldn’t understand. ‘Why would someone do that?’ I thought, Why wouldn’t you?” Walton concluded. “I bring that level of seriousness to everything I do. Comedy, drama — I take it all seriously. How many of these chances will I have? I want to squeeze as much life experience as I possibly can out of each one.”
This isn’t the first time that Walton has detailed the extreme lengths that he has gone to when taking on a character, with the star having a similarly dedicated approach when he landed the role of transgender sex worker Venus Van Dam in Season 5 of Sons of Anarchy, which premiered in 2012.
Walton was still working on Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 movie Django Unchained when he landed the role, and started getting into character immediately. Speaking during an appearance on Wired’s Web’s Most Searched Questions series, he recalled: “I bought a pair of high heels while we were doing Django Unchained, and I walked the streets of New Orleans after wrap, at, like, midnight, every night for the better half of a month, just to get used to it. If you can walk in high heels on cobblestone streets, you can walk in them anywhere.”
What do you make of Walton’s acting process? Let me know in the comments below!
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