The White Lotus wrapped up season 3 in the most tragic and dramatic way possible: Rick killed Jim without realizing he was his father, Chelsea was killed in the cross-fire of the resulting shootout, Rick was shot in the back by Gaitok, and Lochlan almost died from accidental poisoning. It was a lot! But apparently, there was more.
Turns out The White Lotus producers filmed six alternate endings to the show in order to prevent leaks. Though, to be clear: they always knew how things were going to turn out.
“We have fake endings to the scripts,” executive producer David Bernad told People. “So we wrote up… we have six different endings and we kind of distributed fake endings to people just in case someone leaked anything, and then we could say there's different fake endings.”
“And then when we shot the ending scene, it's a locked down set,” he added. “So no one really has access to what we were shooting and there would be no non-White Lotus participants ever seeing what we're doing.”
On top of the show's explosive ending, The White Lotus team were closely guarding the secret of Jon Gries' return, as well as Sam Rockwell's casting.
“Jon was really committed to keeping the secret,” he Bernad said. “And when we were traveling and entered Thailand, he, one time, rode with the equipment in a bus, instead of flying the 45 minutes or whatever it was. I think he drove like, 12 hours from Phuket to Bangkok. But we were shooting at the Four Seasons, a scene with Jon Gries, and there was people looking and filming from a room. They didn't know that what they were filming was sensitive, and I was really scared they were going to post it. So I had the hotel manager go and bring them over to the set and I kind of schmoozed them and got them on my side.”
My biggest takeaway from this? I need to figure out where The White Lotus is filming season 4 and book myself a ticket.
