*Contains spoilers for The White Lotus season 3 finale*
It's been three days and we're still reeling from Chelsea's death in the finale episode of The White Lotus season three, and turns out there was a massive clue about her death in the opening credits we missed all along.
The creators of the iconic White Lotus opening credits Mark Bashore and Katrina Crawford revealed to Cosmopolitan UK, there was in fact a big suggestion as to Chelsea's fate when Aimee Lou Wood's (who plays Chelsea in the series) name pops up on the screen.
"We tried to portray a sense of impending death throughout the sequence. Everything is stalking or being stalked. Eyes peer everywhere," the pair revealed. "Aimee Lou Wood’s character Chelsea is the most clearly violent scene, where an animal has fallen prey to a far more powerful beast. After the finale, that scene makes itself more obvious."
If you cast your mind back to the opening credits, Aimee Lou Wood's name pops up where a tiger is appearing to have killed one animal and is peering over another. Yep, that's some clear foreshadowing we missed.
And btw, the pair are totally aware of many of the fans' theories for each season. "We saw a comment in a fan video that said 'That deer makes me worried for Chelsea'," they told Cosmopolitan UK. "That fan’s worry was justified."
However, for Bashore and Crawford from Plains of Yonder, who have been responsible for creating the opening credits for all three seasons of The White Lotus, it's less about giving away clues with the opening credits and more about revealing something about each character.
"We build the artwork to portray the psychology of a character, not the plot points of the show, which is an important distinction. We are creating, hopefully, scenes that have emotion to them, and that have even more meaning with successive viewings," they explained.
When it came to depicting Walton Goggins' character Rick, who was the eventual shooter in the series, Bashore and Crawford wanted to convey the character's loneliness and alienation from the rest of the group in the art work, which they did by having him "as a lone figure hunched in a tower, separated from the village, cigarette in hand." And so "by the end of season finale, it’s clear that this soul was lost from the start, and would never be able to integrate back into society."
Ok, we're going to need to go back and rewatch the whole opening titles sequence.
The White Lotus is available on SkyAtlantic and NOW
