There’s nothing to see here — so says The White Lotus star Jason Isaacs as he shared an Instagram selfie with co-star Walton Goggins, with a winking reference to the much-speculated-upon off-screen drama that has supposedly accompanied HBO‘s operatic anthology satire.
In one of the two photos posted to social media today, the Harry Potter alum planted a kiss on The Righteous Gemstones actor’s temple, writing, “Guess who was on my plane? Hey, all you genius online sleuths – see any beef?!!” He added, referencing the Season 3 denouement, “#RicksAlive!!!”
Eagle-eyed viewers will also notice Isaacs tagged Duke University in the photo, poking fun at the institution’s censure of the series for displaying its namesake in a murder-suicide dream sequence — something the on-screen Ratliff patriarch had previously called “faintly amusing.”
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For his part, Goggins reposted the pic on his Instagram Story, captioning it, “Got to hug Timothy Ratliff yesterday,” alongside a white heart and lotus emoji.
The sweet interaction comes after much ado has been made about rumors of a splintered cast, prompting mass fan speculation largely after Isaacs himself hinted to behind-the-scenes tension amid the grueling filming process, which took part for the better part of a year on-location in Thailand.
In February, the actor likened the experience to both a “theater camp” and “open air prison,” saying, “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. It’s a long period of time for people to be away from their family with an open bar and all the wildness being in Thailand allows.”
He added also that he “can’t pretend I wasn’t involved in some off-screen drama.”
Isaacs echoed these sentiments later in an interview with Vulture, once again drawing parallels between “summer camp and Lord of the Flies but in a gilded cage.”
“It wasn’t a holiday,” he said. “Some people got very close, there were friendships that were made and friendships that were lost. All the things you would imagine with a group of people unanchored from their home lives on the other side of the world, in the intense pressure cooker of the working environment with eye-melting heat and insects and late nights. They say in the show, ‘What happens in Thailand stays in Thailand,’ but there’s an off-screen White Lotus as well, with fewer deaths but just as much drama.”
Continuing that he would “absolutely not” elaborate further, Isaacs most recently said of the matter that “nobody has the slightest clue what they’re talking about” and “it’s none of your business,” calling out “amateur Sherlock Holmes” who speculate about cast drama based on the performers’ social media activity. He added that his previous comments were about crew members whom viewers had “never met before.”
“I’m just saying it wasn’t a holiday, and partly I started saying that because people think we were on a seven-month holiday, and believe me, it felt like work a lot of the time,” he said in part.
Isaacs’ tongue-in-cheek post also comes shortly after Goggins shut down an interview with the U.K.’s The Times after repeated prodding about his relationship with co-star Aimee Lou Wood, which followed online theorizing that the two, who portrayed fatally doomed couple Rick and Chelsea, had fallen out.