As if that kiss between Sam Nivola and Patrick Schwarzenegger on The White Lotus wasn’t weird enough, the show pushed the incest subplot further by having the brothers engage in a moment of sexual intimacy.
During the Sunday, March 23, episode of the hit HBO series, Saxon (Schwarzenegger) and Lochlan (Nivola) have different reactions after their night of drugs, alcohol and sex. Saxon slowly started to remember exactly what happened, which is when he realized Lochlan was the one who slept with Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon).
Saxon, meanwhile, was in the same bed and getting pleasured by none other than his own brother. Yep, you read that right. And if you didn’t see it the first time,, The White Lotus made sure to flashback three separate times during the episode to the moment when Lochlan was touching Saxon in a sexual manner.
While Saxon just wanted to forget, the situation got worse when Chloe brought it up to Saxon, who pretended he didn’t remember even though no one believed him.
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Before The White Lotus crossed an incest boundary they can’t come back from, Nivola, 21, opened up about the confusing tension between his and Schwarzenegger’s characters.
“We didn’t really talk about it at all until we shot the scene. My character’s big turning point is that moment at the end of episode 5,” Nivola told GQ earlier this month after the brothers initially shared a kiss on screen. “We shot it a few different ways, and we talked about it a lot. I think at the end of the day, it was supposed to just be like they’re all really f—ed up, and, of course, kissing your brother is incredibly wrong and weird and gross. But I think as is the case with The White Lotus, it’s like these crazy actions and sort of heightened reality coming from really real emotions that are actually really relatable to your everyday guy.”
Nivola called the scene “really complicated” from his character’s perspective.
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“He just is desperate for his brother’s approval, and he’s out doing this partying drug thing with Saxon, which is a thing that Saxon keeps talking about, and all he talks about is sex. He’s like, ‘Sex is the main point of life. You need to get laid. That’s what you need,’” he explained. “I’m like, ‘OK. Well, in this charged sexual environment, what can I do to make you notice me and get you to approve of me?’ And then, he does the wrong thing to make that happen.”
Le Bon, 38, meanwhile, recalled Schwarzenegger, 31, needing some encouragement, telling Vulture, “I think for Patrick it was really difficult. For Sam, he was kind of like, ‘It’s whatever, let’s just do it well one time and it will be over.’ Because if you don’t do it well the first time, then you have to do it over and over again.”
She continued: “We all thought he was going to throw up. And Sam was like, ‘It’s fine, it’s just a kiss, calm down!’”
Elsewhere in Sunday’s episode, Chloe attempted to hide her threesome from Gary a.k.a Greg (Jon Gries). Her boyfriend didn’t seem to mind her potentially sleeping with someone else as he was more focused on a gathering he was planning — that he really wanted Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) to attend — for unclear reasons.
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Kate (Leslie Bibb), Laurie (Carrie Coon) and Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) ended up at odds after their night out with Valentin (Arnas Fedaravicius). Married Jaclyn specifically had a lot to answer for after sleeping with Valentin.
Finally, there was Rick (Walton Goggins) who reunited with Frank (Sam Rockwell) on their quest to maybe or maybe not murder Sritala’s (Lek Patravadi) husband and the Ratliff’s continued to fall apart with Timothy (Jason Isaacs) once again not telling his family about the fact that they are now all broke.
New episodes of The White Lotus air on HBO Sundays at 9 p.m. ET.
