The White Lotus season 3

The third season of The White Lotus, an American satirical comedy-drama anthology television series created, written, and directed by Mike White, premiered on HBO on February 16, 2025. The season was greenlit on November 18, 2022, and was filmed in Bangkok, Phuket, and Ko Samui from February to August 2024.
The season features an ensemble cast of Leslie Bibb, Carrie Coon, Walton Goggins, Sarah Catherine Hook, Jason Isaacs, Lalisa Manobal, Michelle Monaghan, Sam Nivola, Lek Patravadi, Parker Posey, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Tayme Thapthimthong, Aimee Lou Wood, Sam Rockwell and Scott Glenn, with Natasha Rothwell and Jon Gries reprising their roles from prior seasons. The series follows the lives of the staff and wealthy guests at a wellness resort in Thailand. The season received positive reviews from critics.
On November 18, 2022, preceding the premiere of the second season, HBO renewed The White Lotus for a third season. Following the second-season finale, series creator Mike White hinted that it would be set in Asia and invoke a "satirical and funny look at death and Eastern religion and spirituality", similar to how the first season focused on money and the second season on sex. The third season's production was disrupted by the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, resulting in the release being pushed to 2025.
Upon the third-season renewal announcement, producers confirmed that there will be a new cast of characters in another White Lotus resort. In April 2023, Natasha Rothwell was reported to be reprising her role as Belinda for the series' third season. In January 2024, it was announced that Leslie Bibb, Jason Isaacs, Michelle Monaghan, Parker Posey, Dom Hetrakul, Tayme Thapthimthong, Carrie Coon, Miloš Biković, Christian Friedel, Morgana O'Reilly, Lek Patravadi, Shalini Peiris, Walton Goggins, Sarah Catherine Hook, Sam Nivola, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Aimee Lou Wood, Francesca Corney, Nicholas Duvernay, and Arnas Fedaravičius joined the cast for the season. Biković's casting was criticized by Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs over his alleged support for Russia's invasion of the country; Biković was subsequently dropped from the cast on February 2, and replaced with Julian Kostov, who will appear in a recurring capacity. In February 2024, Scott Glenn and Lalisa Manobal were cast in the season. In March 2024, Charlotte Le Bon joined the cast to replace Corney in a re-casting.
In March 2023, Variety reported that filming for the third season was likely to take place in one of the Four Seasons hotels in Thailand. Honshu, Japan was scouted as a filming location by Mike White but ultimately Thailand was chosen because the series received a $4.4 million tax incentive for filming there, while Japan does not have a film-incentive system. Principal photography began in February 2024 with locations including Bangkok, Phuket and Ko Samui, and wrapped in August 2024.
The third season premiered on February 16, 2025, on HBO, with the eighth and final episode set to release on April 6, 2025.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 89% of 152 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.8/10. The website's consensus reads, "Darker and more patient with its storytelling than previous seasons while brandishing a superb new ensemble full of acidic performances, The White Lotus' third season offers a spiritual respite that shivs the soul." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 77 out of 100, based on 44 critic reviews.
In RogerEbert.com, Brian Tallerico said season three "will likely be the most visually striking drama you watch this year. White takes full advantage of his setting in a manner that brings it to life in ways that even the last two gorgeous settings didn't produce. The way he constructs his episodes, not just narratively but visually, is arguably without peer on TV right now. He somehow finds a way to capture the opulence and beauty of Thailand while never losing the realism of the stories he's telling there. It's a balancing act between the beauty and the humanity. Of course, the show really comes to life where they intersect." In IndieWire, Ben Travers gave the season a grade of "A-", saying it "smashes each character's flimsy values in ways both hilarious and harrowing. They cannot outrun their pain, but in White's transfixing, exacting new season, their pain can still become our pleasure". With its spiritual themes, some critics likened the season to White's previous series, Enlightened.
The cast received widespread acclaim. In The Washington Post, Lili Loofbourow said, "It's fascinating to watch Goggins in particular — who's usually such a scamp — in this subdued mode". She added, "Coon is of course extraordinary, Monaghan is messy and bold and Bibb excels at projecting a rigid, pleasant diplomacy that gets increasingly brittle as the season unfolds. That old 'White Lotus' magic comes back full force in every scene these three share…Each conversation nudges the obvious tensions forward just a tad. It's propulsive. It's believable. It's very, very funny."
Some critics noted the season gets off to a slower start. However, Alison Herman of Variety said "when the story coalesces and kicks into gear somewhere around its halfway point, it's as wild and unpredictable as any of the powder kegs White has combusted". In Entertainment Weekly, Kristen Baldwin gave the season a grade of "B" and said "The White Lotus still works. Even when the storytelling lags, it's still impossible to check out early."
Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair wrote that White "makes effective use of ominous dreams and portents, letting the spiritual murmur in the air of this lavish jungle compound eerily inform the story. The season is about a sickness of the soul—or, perhaps, the sickness of not having a soul at all." He added this "round of episodes is gloomier than seasons one and two, though still sharp and intriguing where it counts". Of the new characters, Lawson said he found the trio of girlfriends to be the "dishiest and most fun", with "shiveringly credible dialogue delivered with natural flair by the actors".
More critical reviews opined that the show was returning to familiar territory and themes of previous seasons instead of covering new narrative ground. Lawson noted, "It's all interesting, but the sense of tight control and inventiveness that made the previous two seasons such wonders is not quite there," and commented that the season relies "on perhaps a few too many clichés as [White] struggles to come up with new things for curdled rich people to do". Kathryn VanArendonk of Vulture said, "It's fun when The White Lotus reconsiders itself in structural ways, but at other points there's something anxious about how the series wants to wrestle with its previous obsessions, or continue to ignore its repeated blindspots, like pressing on a bruise to make sure it's still there." In The New Yorker, Inkoo Kang said, "The season as a whole feels trapped between tones: not quite dark enough to confront what happens in a country where foreigners can buy nearly anything they want for the right price, nor frothy enough to simply showcase the baroque weirdness of the wealthy."
Multiple critics expressed that the native characters of color are not given as much depth as the white lead characters. VanArendonk wrote, "As various season-three characters seek enlightenment or escape, they recreate the season-one dynamic where white characters are full of fascinating, absorbing peculiarities, while the non-white hotel staff are one-note ciphers, destined to keep the plot moving but not have interiority or complex emotional lives."
The third season is the most-watched season of The White Lotus and is averaging more than 5 million more viewers than the second season, which had an average of 15.5 million viewers. The seventh episode of the season was the most-watched episode of the series at 4.8 million viewers across its linear airings on HBO and its streaming viewership on Max. The season premiere had 2.4 million viewers, episodes 3 and 4 had 3.4 million, and episode 5 had 4.2 million, while viewership from episodes 2 and 5 were not released.
Ko Samui, the shooting location of the third season, experienced a 65% increase in hotel bookings and reservations since its premiere.