Hello, welcome!
Parker Posey: Hello, I love Türkiye. I’ve been to İstanbul twice.
Oh, really?
Parker Posey: Yes. The Hagia Sophia is so beautiful. Brought me to tears.. It’s a beautiful land.
So glad to hear this! When did you visit?
Parker Posey: It should be 2005. I shot Fay Grim in İstanbul, Hal Hartley’s movie. That’s what brought me my first time to Türkiye. I hope to go back again.
I hope so, too. It’s especially exciting to meet you. Actually, I’ve been a huge fan of your work for years. I was actually a bit nervous to watch the third season because I loved the previous seasons of The White Lotus. So there are big expectations. I had a lot of fun watching your character, the judgmental, comically tragic, drug addicted Victoria. What was it like bringing that character to life?
Parker Posey: I really enjoyed bringing her to life. I’m from the South in America, and whenever I’ve traveled around the world and people hear America, they go to the South and they imitate a southern accent. And part of creating her was having fun with this idea of a The White Lotus, American, deep South, dramatic, passionate family that is in their own world. Like, it makes me laugh that Victoria could be anywhere in the world. She has no real interest in Thailand. She’ll have a lovely time there. But her family is so important and anytime you get that passion and that love, it’s lovable. Even though she’s not, like you said, she’s judgmental and she’s controlling and all those things. But I think we can understand the powerful mother and how much control she can wield. Right. So I loved it. I’m so glad. Yeah, it was fun. It was funny. I get some great lines and some great jokes in there. So reading the material and coming up with the kind of snobby person that would say these things and live in this way was really fun. We laughed a lot.
How would you describe the energy of season three compared to the previous ones?
Parker Posey: It was full on. You know, when you have a successful show for one season it’s kind of a fluke. And then you have the second season and people are like fans, and they really like it. And then there’s a lot of pressure on creating a third season. And when I heard that this was in Thailand, it was going to have this. This wild energy. You know, Thailand is. Do you know the movie Apocalypto? Did you ever see that? It had this kind of this energy and this. This force. When I read eight episodes, I forgot who died in the end. I was so caught up in the story and loving these characters that I didn’t want to know who died. You’re really in the story. You really care about these people. I loved the movies and the TV shows, like Agatha Christie. You don’t know. You know these people. As an actor, you get to play with this mystery. Is she capable of doing something crazy? So everyone has this kind of edge in the The White Lotus that you just go, could they kill somebody or could they betray someone? So this, as a performer, is so much fun to play with.
Victoria is a strong woman. She seems a bit jaded and arrogant but she’s kind of hiding her intelligence. Maybe its needed for family dynamics.
Parker Posey: Being able to play a mother and a complicated woman was so fun. I’m not a mother in real life, I don’t have kids. But I’m a woman, I love my mother. Right? I love other people, my friends and my chosen family. So it struck me when I started to enter into the role as a mother. I was talking to my friend who’s a mom about this. I said, sometimes a mother can feel almost like she’s invisible, but she’s also taking on the role as mother, even though she’s not saying anything. I think with Victoria is projecting so much of her own desires and her fear onto her children. And that’s a form of her love. We know it’s controlling, we know it has a lot of force and it’s narcissistic to say the least.
Absolutely! So, how was the filming?
Parker Posey: We had a really fun time in the Ratliff Villa when we could really play and laugh. Mike White is an actor too, so he would take on our characters and kind of play them back at us. We would build on things and improve a little bit and things would take shape. There was a lot of material so what you see with 11 different characters was a lot of output. I kept thinking about Mike White in the Amazing Race and Survivor. He was on season 37 of Survivor, so his auteurship is really like an extreme sport. I think he brings in his actors and his story along in this ride. So we were really propelled. And I’ve never had such an experience of working. Imagine working in a five star resort hotels in a jungle. It was so fun and exotic. I came out of Thailand so touched by it. It was a beautiful kingdom, magical. It soothed my soul. I found it to be a really soulful experience. We were all changed. And, you know, the glory of it all, it was something to go through. It was great.
What was the most important part about working on The White Lotus for you?
Parker Posey: I never been to Asia and I got to basically live in another country for seven months. Being away from your home and entering into another culture and land is such a gift. I love that aspect about my life and my path as an actor and a performer. I get to enter into these worlds and into these stories. I found Thailand very healing as a place. I loved their relationship to food and how they ate and how they greeted each other. I think my favorite part is always when you’re approaching a scene in a play and you’re like, I don’t really understand this scene, and it makes me a little nervous. It ends up being the most favorite part. So this was like an endurance. And as you approach the finish line, you start to see the gift and the resilience.
Walton, who is Rick in our story, he saw a monitor lizard eat a frog, and he’d never seen that before. It was exotic. I had this crack in the door of my room and kept having these fantasies about insects and things are getting into the room. It was truly exotic. And that was my favorite thing. The birds with the feathered heads, I forget what they’re called, but there were these beautiful birds. I loved riding my bike around and just kind of being in a different country.
