Michelle Monaghan, Carrie Coon and Leslie Bibb are all in agreement about what their characters on The White Lotus need. “If they were able to be honest and vulnerable with each other, to truly reconnect, it would have laid the foundation for a really beautiful bonding vacation,” says Monaghan. “But they’re too busy trying to keep up surface-level appearances to actually go deep.”
Instead, the trio of friends looking to reconnect on a girls’ trip to Thailand have experienced a holiday of un-bonding, going from peppering one another with empty compliments at check-in to firing off loaded truths the night before checkout. In the process, creator Mike White has taken the group he once called the “Blonde Blob” – so named after a group of women he once saw on holiday who appeared at a glance to all be variations of the same white, blonde American traveller – and slowly dissembled their friendship. It might never be put back together, and maybe it shouldn’t be.
The storyline has become this season’s sleeper hit, in part because Monaghan and her costars were able to ask the questions their characters couldn’t. “We wanted to know, ‘Why do we endure these relationships? Why do we perpetuate them?’ ” she says. In the penultimate episode of the season, Monaghan and White cut so deep, they might have hit bone. During a dinner-table confrontation, Monaghan’s Jaclyn reads Coon’s Laurie for filth. A clip of Monaghan delivering the killing blow – “If you keep choosing the short stick, is it bad luck? Are you life’s victim? Or are you doing it to yourself?” – has been shared far and wide online, prompting fans to compare their own relationships to the toxic trio.
With only one episode left in the season, Monaghan spoke to Harper’s Bazaar – the final of our three interviews with the 'Blonde Blob' –to reflect on how the ladies’ trip started, how it went, and how it will end with a “reckoning”.
Jaclyn is set up as the alpha of the White Lotus girls’ trip. What did you want to explore with her character?
Well, we all have comparing minds, and as women, we’ve all experienced the way that we’ve been socially conditioned to not only compare ourselves but to be competitive. So we’re very self-critical, we judge ourselves harshly, and we inevitably judge others. As a result, we’re constantly comparing our own failures against someone else’s successes. That was what Mike wanted to explore.
With the trio, as those power dynamics shift; there’s the peacekeeper one minute and then the aggressor, the victim, and all these various different archetypes. Initially, the idea was to explore Jaclyn as the person who was in pole position, so to speak. She had the fame, the financial power, the privilege. I think the women are all privileged, but she was the one who instigated this girls’ trip, so the question was how her money or fame might influence the other two.
Jaclyn gets to bask in the benevolence of treating her friends to the villa and potentially to the whole trip. Do you think that she’s fully aware of how she wields that benevolence to maintain the upper hand?
I don’t think it’s a conscious thing, to be honest. But from what we discover about their shared history within the show, it sounds like she was the alpha in their group from a very young age, right? It’s maybe no surprise that life took her down the path of being an actor — and a famous one at that. So I think she’s been living that benevolence for quite some time. And, you know, audiences who love The White Lotus will just be absolutely tickled by seeing the affectedness that some celebrities have because they live in their own little bubble — and then by seeing that bubble burst.
To be honest, it was initially a little confronting for me to play an actress! I’m not going to lie, it felt very close to the bone. When I read the script for that first episode, I was shaking in my boots! I didn’t want to play someone that people would think was me. But after I got to binge-read all eight episodes, I realised, Okay, this is a character, and all we have in common is her job. That was when I got to explore: how does she use her celebrity to her advantage? How does she manipulate situations? What exactly is the cliché of the Hollywood actress?
I think in the first half of the season, or the first couple of days of their holiday, she’s really leaning into the facade of who she is. She’s famous, and you can see that she really enjoys all those clichéd trappings that come with it. And then, in true Mike White form, the facade starts to melt away with all of these characters. Specifically with Jaclyn – you start to see her be a little bit more human and a little bit more flawed. And those are the parts that were really fun to unpack.
When Jaclyn is recognised at the “bargain hotel for retirees,” you get the sense that she wants attention from only certain types of people and not others. What do you think her relationship with her fame is?
I think she has a love-hate relationship with her fame. I think that she really depends on external validation; she enjoys it, and it makes her feel special. But she only likes the attention when she wants the attention. And of course, it can also be a nuisance whenever she gets recognised if she has no interest in being recognised. One of the interesting things about Jaclyn is how she’s dependent on this external validation, a little like a drug, because in reality she leads an inauthentic life where she’s not alone but she is lonely. And we see the impact of that as the season progresses.
You’ve said before that Jaclyn is not getting what she needs from Laurie and Kate. Is that coloured by her loneliness? In her ideal world, what would she be getting from her friends?
These are lifelong friends, and they want to have that same connection from back in the day. So she takes them on vacation, thinking that they’re going to reconnect, but she’s discovering that both of her friends are very different from who she is now. They’re all very different from who they used to be, and from each other. They all have very different family dynamics. They’ve made different decisions socially, politically. And I think that’s a little disappointing for her – and it’s not as stimulating as Hollywood for her.
Keep in mind, they’re there to relax and detox, and she’s over the detox part of it. Then the big trigger for her is that her partner back home is not answering her calls, and that brings up a lot of insecurities. Meanwhile, she’s not feeling stimulated with the other women. So she’s not getting her validation at home or with her friends, and she goes out and searches for it in all the wrong places.
In the first episode of the season, we see the women perform this really hilarious form of toxic positivity. They’re just lobbing compliments at each other, but the compliments were actually foreshadowing the ways they were going to turn on each other later. Is it perversely fun to act out that kind of cultural commentary?
That was something that Leslie and Carrie and I have all experienced as women. I’ll run into someone and we’ll say, “Oh my God, you look great!” “You do too!” “No, you look great!” There’s just a rhythm in which women communicate. I don’t know if dudes do it. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen my husband say to a guy friend, “Oh man, you look so good!” I mean, it’s just the way in which we interact with each other as women, especially when we haven’t seen each other for a long time. But I hadn’t actually seen it on the page before. And when we first started saying it out loud, it was like, “Oh my gosh, this is real!” So we had so much fun just leaning into that.
These women will communicate in every way except directly. Insults via compliments, connection via side-eye, silent facial contortions galore.
I think what’s so special about the show itself, and specifically with this storyline this season, is that Mike as a director allows for all these nonverbal moments. I think that’s where the relationships between characters really sing. And I can say that now definitively, because you see those moments shared all over the internet. It makes watching the show so interactive and makes it so much fun. It brings me so much joy watching everybody get so much joy from it.
And that’s all a direct result of Mike creating that space, creatively, for us to have a pregnant pause where we can just let a significant moment or line land on our face. When you watch those scenes, you can even imagine one of us kicking the other underneath the table – and during the Trump scene, we did do that as our characters. Once we really started to slow down and take our time, that’s when it started to get really ooey and gooey and juicy.
In episode 2, when the ladies share the results of their biomarker tests, you see how Jaclyn is someone who wants validation and how Laurie is someone who does not want to give out validation. It was low-key a definitive scene for their relationship. Did you see it that way?
Oh, the way Laurie just enjoys saying to Jaclyn [after she claims Valentin told her she has “the numbers of someone half my age”], “He might say that to everybody. He said the same thing to me.” Ugh! It’s devastating! I love that scene so much because it’s the first time that we actually start to see the needling, the poking, the competitiveness. We didn’t really talk about it or rehearse it as a threesome. I think that we all inherently understood the subtext of the scene.
And again, that’s a testament to Mike’s writing. The subtext is there in the writing, and the meaning and the performances really lie within that subtext. Even the way Jaclyn questions Laurie [about her fat mass being under 25 per cent], like, “Is that right?” But with a big smile! It says so much about Jaclyn’s discomfort with thinking, Wait, I’m supposed to be number one. So that’s the first scene that I think we as an audience really start to get triggered.
Oh, and by the way, that scene is the one with Kate’s rant on beans, which was just the best, and unfortunately for audiences, that rant went on for probably two full minutes more before it was cut down. Kate and Laurie going back and forth about beans and all the different kinds of beans that you can have, and then Jaclyn jumps in and says, “You guys eat beans? But the bloat! I can’t eat beans. I hate the bloat!”
There was so much great stuff that was ultimately cut, and I can’t imagine how difficult that is for Mike – because it’s all so brilliant! But it became like this whole thing that we still talk about. We ladies refer to it as the “bean scene”.
I’m going to petition HBO to release the Blonde Blob bean scene! But there’s another pivotal scene to talk about first. In the season’s penultimate episode, we see a kind of showdown between Jaclyn and Laurie over dinner. Do you think Jaclyn can ever admit to herself that she did do her friend dirty?
Oh, she knows she’s done something wrong. And I think that’s unfolding during that dinner scene. I love the idea that the women know each other so well – because they’ve known each other their whole lives – and so they’re just absolute ninjas at deflecting each other. They’re deftly deflecting any kind of accusation and pivoting the conversation in their favour.
But really, it’s all about not wanting to take responsibility for their own actions. They’re more inclined to hurt each other in those moments than really try to connect and understand each other’s insecurities. And I think the second that Laurie leaves the table, Jaclyn realises what she’s done is incredibly hurtful. We’re going to see the aftermath of that night in the finale. There’s going to be a reckoning between the ladies.
Which of these three women would you actually want to go on vacation with?
Oh my God, that’s such a funny question. Which of these women would I want to travel with? I gotta say, probably not Kate. Although I love traveling with Leslie, I wouldn’t want to travel with Kate. I think I’d like travelling with Jaclyn and Laurie – but they just have to lay off the alcohol.
Poor long-suffering Kate! Caught between her two toxic friends. If she ditches them, I’ll go on vacation with her.
Well, she’s the ultimate peacekeeper, right? She does really just want everybody to have a great time, but she’s dealing with two women that clearly have some serious issues.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
