Jason Isaacs’ TV children are setting the record straight on that shocking full-frontal moment on The White Lotus.
“That wasn’t his real penis,” Sam Nivola, who plays Lachlan Ratliff in the show, told TV Insider on Tuesday, March 11, while his onscreen sister Sarah Catherine Hook confirmed, “It was a prosthetic.”
Hook, 29 — who joked that she “blacked out” while filming the scene— recalled it being “really funny” when Isaacs literally bared it all.
“He was very excited to do it. I think he took pride in the prosthetic. He gave that guy a nice shot several times,” Hook quipped, to which Nivola, 21, added, “He’s like, ‘It’s my fake dick scene today!’”
In the Sunday, March 9, episode of The White Lotus, viewers watched as Timothy Ratliff (Isaacs) learned that he will probably be sent to prison for money laundering and bribery when he returns to the U.S. from Thailand — and began spiraling by stealing wife Victoria’s (Parker Posey) anti-anxiety meds.
After consuming the pills, Timothy accidentally flashes his family — which includes wife Victoria, sons Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), Lachlan and daughter Piper (Hook) — when his robe opens.
Isaacs, for his part, joked he’s ready to repeat the moment in his next acting gig. “Yeah, it is now in my contract for every show I do, so we’ll see,” Isaacs quipped to Entertainment Weekly on Sunday. “It’ll get easier, hopefully.”
“He’s drugging himself into a stupor to try not to think about the fact that his entire life is blowing up and trying to work out what to do about it,” Isaacs continued of Timothy. “It was actually quite challenging — I remember reading the scripts thinking, ‘Wow, I’ve got to keep my powder dry for five or six episodes, and then this s— really kicks off.’ You haven’t seen other things that are coming, but I just remember thinking, ‘I better dig deep and produce something here,’ because there’s a lot of parts you can go through and tell a very dramatic story without your character going through anything extreme. But there’s some big, old acting coming up.”
While teasing the rest of his character’s season 3 arc, Isaacs remained tight-lipped — but equated the events to a “Shakespearean tragedy.”
“He’s been bottling it up for a very long time,” he explained. “There is a point coming when they leave — if they make it and they’re alive, because who knows — but it’s going to be unavoidable, the big secret he has been harboring.”
Isaacs admitted that he’s unsure how he “pulled it off,” but said the audience “will see whether I did it or not.”
“It’ll be up to them to judge, but I just remember thinking, ‘I’ve got to go big — go big or go home,’” Isaacs recalled. “And then when things happen that I can’t talk about particularly, something else had to kick in, and there’s a mania and a terror that you have to access. You’ve got to get there. I mean, you’ve got to be as real as you can. And yeah, there was some inner gear changes required.”
New episodes of The White Lotus air on HBO Sundays at 9 p.m. ET.
