The first paparazzi photos from the Season 4 set landed this week, and after years of scanning paparazzi photos for interesting stories in my job, I of course looked closely to try and find clues to the next season of the best (if not the most anticipated show) on TV, now that the Summer House reunion part 1 has aired. On May 26, photographers snapped Laura Dern, Marissa Long and Chris Messina filming near the iconic steps of the Palais des Festivals, with Charlie Hall, AJ Michalka, Alexander Ludwig and Chloe Bennet also photographed separately on and around the Croisette.
Why do we want to know the details?
The White Lotus works because it makes you complicit. You laugh at these awful people, then catch yourself, then laugh again. Across three seasons (Hawaii, Sicily, Thailand) the formula holds: obscenely privileged guests arrive at a paradise that quietly judges them, staff absorb their damage with professional smiles, and someone ends up dead. The common threads are wealth as pathology, desire as self-destruction, and the yawning power gap between those who are served and those who serve. Every season has its rotten marriage, its lost soul, its predator who doesn't know they're one. Lainey Gossip, puts it neatly: season one was about class differences, season two was sexual politics, season three was self-improvement and religion. Season four, she writes, will be about celebrity fixation. The location changes but human nature doesn't. Now, on to France.
What We Know About the Plot
Variety has reported the basic premise: two rival film teams descend on Cannes with movies in competition and something to prove. One camps out at a flashy, palatial hotel on the Croisette, the Hôtel Martinez, standing in as the White Lotus Cannes, while the other is ensconced in a luxurious hilltop hideaway, the Airelles Château de la Messardière in Saint-Tropez, doubling as the White Lotus du Cap. The two hotels represent two rival camps, both literally and figuratively. This is the first season to feature two White Lotus properties rather than one, and the first not to use a Four Seasons. Having been to the Martinez myself for the advertising festival at Cannes, it is a surprising choice since it never felt particularly luxurious to me. The price of a glass of rosé was high but it was not Four Seasons level.
The two hotels are very different, the Martinez is an Art Deco building constructed in the 1920s for Italian nobles, with 410 rooms and suites, a Michelin-starred restaurant, a private beach club out front and penthouse apartments with 180-degree views of the Bay of Cannes. Rooms during high season start at around $900 a night, though during the actual festival they can reach $10,000. The Château de la Messardière, by contrast, has just 84 rooms across the main château and villas scattered across a 25-acre estate above Saint-Tropez. Rooms start at $3,500 in high season, rising to $11,000 for the Prestige suite. It has six restaurants including a Japanese-Peruvian fusion restaurant by Nobu founder Nobuyuki Matsuhisa. The show has always used its hotels as character, and these two could not be more different in register: one is the place you go to be seen on the Croisette, the other is the place you go when you can afford not to be.
The UK Times also notes that filming will take place at the Hôtel Lutetia in Paris, a Parisian landmark built in 1910 with a notably dark history. The hotel was requisitioned by German military intelligence during the Second World War, and its rooms were later made available to Jewish concentration camp survivors returning to Paris after liberation. Whether that history feeds into the narrative is unknown, but Mike White has never chosen a location carelessly.
Mike White has described the season as being about fame, specifically about who has the world's attention and what that does to people. You can see why Celebrity Intelligence is particularly interested this year. Executive producer David Bernad told the Canneseries audience that the season examines the loneliness and pain of an artist's life as a throughline, with relationships corroding when some characters are reckoning with the sacrifices they made as artists while others are just beginning to enter the world of celebrity. White himself put it more plainly on The White Lotus podcast: he wanted to satirise "stuff that I know about, art and criticism and movies and fame and celebrity and a film festival type of thing." White spent years trying to make it in Hollywood before this show changed everything for him. At some level, Season 4 seems personal.
The photos from this week's shoot contain details that go well beyond location scouting. There are costume choices that point directly at character dynamics, a piece of Laura Dern's biography that makes her casting feel almost fated, a Steve Coogan quote that reframes the entire Helena Bonham Carter story, and a fan theory about where the season's murder actually happens that is more plausible than most. All of that is below for paid subscribers, along with everything the Reddit ecosystem is currently arguing about and the one production detail that tells us exactly what we have not seen yet.
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