Mike White always knew how it would end.
Months before the shoot began for the second season of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” which ended in a murderous finale on Sunday night (and if you have not yet seen that finale, now would be a fine time to stop reading), he called the actress Jennifer Coolidge, his friend and a longtime collaborator. Coolidge’s Tanya, a lip-plumped heiress with a tenuous connection to observable reality, was one of only two characters to carry over from the first season, set at a five-star hotel in Hawaii, to this one, set at a sister property in Sicily.
“Jennifer,” he told her. “I’m sorry. You’re dying.”
He meant that in the finale, as not even the most obsessive fan had predicted, Coolidge’s Tanya, having shot her way through a yacht full of “high-end gays” intent on assassinating her, misjudges the distance from the deck to a dinghy and plunges, ineptly, to her death. In a filmed post-episode interview, White described the death as purposefully “derpy.”
In a season focused on desire and its consequences, the finale also saw a rekindling of the romance between the unhappily married Ethan (Will Sharpe) and Harper (Aubrey Plaza); a new understanding among the three generations of Di Grasso men (F. Murray Abraham, Michael Imperioli, Adam DiMarco); and triumph for the local young women Mia and Lucia (Beatrice Grannò and Simona Tabasco). Mostly unchanged: Tanya’s assistant Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), still making questionable fashion choices, and Cameron (Theo James) and Daphne (Meghann Fahy), the happily entitled young marrieds.
On Sunday night, at Coolidge’s home, she and White watched the finale together. And on Monday morning, each logged on to discuss Tanya’s gauche, tragic demise and where the series, already renewed for a third season, might go from here. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
