Was Jason Isaacs Wearing A Prosthetic On The White Lotus? The Truth
Here's the tea on what was real, and what wasn't.
Jason Isaacs has joined an exclusive club of The White Lotus actors who bared it all in shocking scenes on HBO’s vacation drama. At the beginning of Season 3’s fourth episode, Isaacs’ character Timothy Ratliff stumbled into a family conversation still groggy from his wife’s Lorazepam pills. As they bickered, a disheveled Timothy’s robe inadvertently fell open, freeing the former Harry Potter star’s basilisk from its chamber of secrets. But just how much of Isaacs was really shown in that moment? His co-stars confirmed the truth in a recent interview.
“That wasn’t his real penis,” Sam Nivola, who plays Isaacs’ on-screen son Lochlan Ratliff, confirmed in a TV Insider video. Just like Theo James from last season, Isaacs applied a prosthetic member to himself for the quick shot.
“It was really funny. He was very excited to do it,” added Sarah Catherine Hook, who plays Timothy’s daughter Piper Ratliff. “I think he took pride in the prosthetic.”
“He was like, ‘It’s my fake d*ck scene today!’” Nivola recalled.
This penchant for showing some skin seems to run in the Ratliff family, as Timothy’s eldest son Saxon (played by Patrick Schwarzenegger) got completely nude in the first episode of Season 3.
Isaacs explained why The White Lotus’ use of male nudity is so important, crediting creator Mike White with infusing meaning and purpose into the revealing scenes. “He’s trying to right the balance of how many naked women I’ve seen growing up on every television show and film,” Isaacs said in an interview with Decider. “Nudity is the thing. He uses it sometimes for comedy, sometimes for sex, sometimes the manipulation. It’s a good TV moment.”
Isaacs also teased that while his character may be in a pilled-up stupor now, things are about to kick into high gear towards the end of the season. “I just remember thinking, 'I've got to go big — go big or go home.' And then when things happen that I can't talk about particularly, something else had to kick in, and there's a mania and a terror that you have to access,” the actor told Entertainment Weekly. “You've got to get there. I mean, you've got to be as real as you can. And yeah, there was some inner gear changes required.”
