“Let’s just say when I watched it, I was shocked. “I don’t know if I would go that far,” Bartlett says. I got to feel what it is to experience that moment in shock. When I watched it, I wasn’t expecting it to be so one-shot.
But at the same time when I saw it on the page and more so when I saw it on screen it was the perfect moment in the story, because it’s got the kind of shock value that really works in the moment. “When I got the script, I thought, ‘Oh this isn’t going to be that bad.’ And then when I saw it I was like, ‘Oh my god.’ I had no idea it was going to be that explicit. “Are you traumatized?” Bartlett asks, roaring with laughter. Moments later, his White Lotus character, the highly strung hotel manager Armond, apparently died in a bathtub after being stabbed by rich-boy guest Shane (Jake Lacy), into whose suitcase Armond had squatted down in a gleeful act of righteous vengeance against the kind of obnoxious white privilege that Mike White’s comedy drama has been skewering and satirizing these last six weeks. In both blatancy and lyricism it sets a new on-screen turd standard. Murray Bartlett and I spoke moments after I saw him take surely the most beatific crap ever taken on television.
