Checking Into the Real-Life White Lotus
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The most talked about hotel of the year may be The White Lotus, the fictional five-star resort at the center of Mike White’s HBO series about white privilege, colonialism, and rich people behaving badly. The show started quietly when it premiered in July only to become a rarity in 2021: a genuine watercooler hit (despite no one being anywhere near an office watercooler). Memes were born, fashions debated. The Tony-nominated writer of Slave Play, Jeremy O. Harris, tweeted: “I need a dramaturgical explanation for Rachel’s Goyard bag.” The pilot has now been seen more than seven million times and The White Lotus is expected to dominate next year’s awards season.
The six-episode series (which has been renewed for a second season) was shot entirely on location at the Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea during the pandemic, with the cast and crew largely taking over the 15-acre property. Rumor has it, when the hotel brass received the HBO offer, they said yes without reading a single script. At that point, the resort had been boarded up for roughly seven months and The White Lotus was a chance to bring back some of the long-furloughed staff. Besides, it was HBO! What could go wrong?
Had they seen the scripts, well, they might have had a few questions. The show was one-part murder mystery, two-parts Upstairs/Downstairs with a hit of Ketamine. Among the juicier storylines: the fictional resort manager, Armond (played with delicious verve by Murray Bartlett), falls off the wagon after five years of sobriety and finds himself caught in an extremely compromising position by an entitled guest. When asked about the show’s portrayal of the tourism industry by the L.A. Times, representatives for the Four Seasons declined to comment. But the gamble appears to have paid off. As the Delta variant surged and our dreams of a Hot Girl Summer faded, The White Lotus unspooled like a 4K HD postcard beckoning fans to visit the West Maui mountains and the island’s blue, placid waters.
The real-life general manager of the Four Seasons Resort Maui, Ben Shank—who bears a passing resemblance to Murray Bartlett—admits his phone has been ringing off the hook since the show exploded. “Nonstop, nonstop, nonstop,” he told me, seated in the hotel lobby. “It’s taken on a life of its own. You could imagine the amount of calls we’ve gotten like, ‘Is that really—’ It’s like, No, far from it,” he said, adding: “I thought Hawaii was featured beautifully.”
But just how similar is the show to the actual Four Seasons Maui? I went to see for myself. And, as with most stories, the truth is stranger than fiction. Come for the palm trees. Stay for the nourishing on-site IV drip.
If you remember The White Lotus, Armond commits the show’s original sin by double-booking the coveted Pineapple Suite; rather than own up to his mistake, he moves newlywed rich kid Shane Patton and his journalist wife Rachel into a room with a killer view but no plunge pool. Burning Question #1: Is there a Pineapple Suite? There is not. Nor is there a private pool. Production designer Laura Fox re-designed the hotel’s Lokelani Presidential Suite (which rents for $26,000 a night), bringing in those richly detailed prints you saw on TV. (Mike White had told Fox to imagine “The Madonna Inn and the Four Seasons having a baby” and let her run wild). Still, guests have repeatedly asked for tours of the much-discussed suite. Unfortunately, it’s almost always occupied.
Burning Question #2 concerns the Mossbachers. Connie Britton starred as Nicole Mossbacher (the CFO of a large search engine company); Steve Zahn played her husband, Mark, who cheated on his wife, then apologized with a pair of $75,000 bracelets. With all that talk of their cash, why were the Mossbachers staying in The Tradewinds—a junior suite!—forcing their college-age daughter Olivia and her friend Paula to sleep on a pull-out couch while their son Quinn slept in the kitchen?
Answer: Dramatic license. The Tradewinds Suite was actually the hotel’s Maile Presidential Suite, which has three bedrooms. (You can see one of the doors when the girls are doing ASMR in bed.) The room also has its own dry sauna. While we’re on the topic, why was Nicole Mossbacher moving the furniture around herself before a work call, complaining that she looked “freakish” on Zoom? That’s Burning Question #3. For the record, the front desk will happily send up a Ring Light for those important calls with Asia. (While you’re at it, you can also have a Peloton bike brought in.)
But what of the spa? So much of The White Lotus drama concerned Jennifer Coolidge’s grieving character, Tanya McQuoid, having a cathartic experience during a treatment from manager Belinda (the superb Natasha Rothwell). How often do the guests breakdown during a treatment? I posed Burning Question #4 to my masseuse after a 50-minute massage in a traditional open-air, thatch-roofed hut called a hale. It hasn’t happened to her recently, she said, but since the pandemic she revealed, she has heard of many more visitors having an emotional release on the table.
Maybe The White Lotus didn’t go far enough. I would have loved to see Tanya enjoy a customized IV therapy treatment from Next|Health, a wellness clinic that earlier this summer opened its first on-site outpost at the Four Seasons.
Upon arrival at the softly lit room, I was greeted by a host who looked more like a trainer at Equinox than someone who was about to stick a catheter in my arm. He ushered me to a plush chair and laid out an IV Therapy Menu, detailing options like the Hangover IV (“Protect and support your kidney and liver function, gain relief from the pesky symptoms of a hangover”) and the Longevity IV (“Includes antioxidants, amino acids, and vitamins that support detoxification, improved energy, and revitalizes hair, skin and nails”).
If I’d had more time (or patience), I might have opted for the four-hour NAD+ treatment—a coenzyme regimen dubbed “The Fountain of Youth”—that one can do in the comfort of their own suite for $1,500. Instead, I chose a 30-minute Detox drip (“Cleanse and reboot your system, clear skin, brightens eyes, and increases energy levels”) with a 10-minute NAD+ booster.
Did I feel any younger after? Were my eyes clearer? Who’s to say. But I certainly wanted to believe it.
At the White Lotus (and its real-life counterpart) the truest pleasures turned out to be the simplest. Which brings us to Burning Question #5. One morning, some friends and I signed up for the outrigger canoe and—with the help of a couple of instructors—we paddled out into the perfectly-warm ocean waters to take in the view.
The 42-foot-long boats featured prominently on The White Lotus; when one of the oarsmen quits, the locals invite petulant teen Quinn Mossbacher to join their squad. Would those yoked He-Men really have invited a skinny white kid from the mainland on board? “That’s a negative,” our Samoan guide said with a laugh.
I could understand why Quinn was so excited. As we swam around the boat, our guide pointed out a red pencil urchin and a black urchin below. Lunch? Also a negative: the warm water sours the taste of uni. “If it tasted good,” he said, “you’d be eating at my food truck.”
A food truck, right. Suddenly I realized we hadn’t left the property in days—which is also very White Lotus. But that appears to be changing as travelers return, yearning for experiences rooted in the island’s history. Said Ben Shank, the GM at the Four Seasons: “Generationally, people are more concerned about community. ‘Don’t tell me the most popular restaurant that all the tourists. I want to go off the beaten path.’ And I think that ties into connecting with the community, and really trying to immerse.”
The hotel offers lei-making classes and ukulele lessons, and for $26,450, the Four Seasons will arrange “A Taste of Island Life,” which involves a helicopter whisking travelers high above waterfalls and over Haleakala, the dormant volcano that makes up 75 percent of the island.
But The White Lotus opened a thornier can of worms. As Mike White told the L.A. Times, “Hawaii is a very paradisiacal and idyllic place, but also the more time you spend there, the more you realize how complex the history is, and also how the history is a living thing—the colonial legacy is still a living issue.” In other words: How do you travel to Hawaii without being, well, a Mossbacher?
You can start by spending money locally. The best meal I had—in a string of great meals—was at Kitoko Maui, a food truck in Kihei owned by Cole Hinueber, a French-trained pastry chef who was furloughed from Spago early in the pandemic and pivoted to selling Bento boxes out of a parking lot dressed in a chef’s jacket.
His truck is a marvel: a five-star restaurant on wheels, with three cooks working a tiny six-burner kitchen like a game of Jenga. For lunch, chef took a whole chicken raised on the Big Island, marinated it in soy sauce, a house-made hot sauce and some pickle juice, then slow cooked the whole thing in a dehydrator before finishing the bird on a charcoal grill tableside.
What he’s selling is delicious, but it’s also an experience literally rooted in the ground. (Even the stainless steel Bento boxes are made locally.) That’s another way to give back. Through the hotel, I signed-up for the state’s Malama Hawaii program—a volunteer experience run in collaboration with the Pacific Whale Foundation—that lets visitors clean up the beach, carting away whatever debris they find and logging it for the foundation’s records. The concierge dropped a large grain sack off in my room one morning along with some gloves and I hit the sand.
Sure, walking up and down the beach at Wailea for three hours felt a little performative. Like the perfectly selected books the White Lotus girls conspicuously read by the pool. But I also picked up a bunch of cigarette butts and empty water bottles from the side of the road, plus the remnants of some weird purple coffee drink.
Which brings me to Burning Question #6. Are the guests anything like the ones on The White Lotus? The hotel’s GM declined to share any anecdotes about some of the wilder demands, telling me: “Honestly, I’m the type—each day, I filter that out and move on.” Fair enough. If he’d ever angrily defecated in a guest’s luggage as Armond did on The White Lotus, he certainly wasn’t going to tell me.
I did see more than one guest carrying around Rachel’s much discussed Goyard bag—as a beach tote! But for the most part, everyone was respectful. Ironically, the only person I truly saw act like a guest from The White Lotus was the Emmy-nominated star of a previous HBO watercooler show, who happened to be dining at the hotel on my last night in Maui. He sat at Ferraro’s, the beachfront casual Italian restaurant, talking at full volume about his workout routine before loudly spewing misinformation about COVID-19. He later got upset with the waiter because—checks notes—the hotel bathroom was too far from his table?
“I don’t know why it’s not right there!” he sniffed before ordering another Mai Tai.
If you look closely enough, maybe we’re all a bit like one White Lotus character or another. In the end, I’m more Olivia Mossbacher than Quinn. To ease the anxiety of a red eye flight that would bleed right into another workday, I took a Klonopin before takeoff and tried to sleep, dreaming of another escape. Oh, that’s Burning Question #7: The GM of the Four Seasons heard a rumor that season two of The White Lotus might film in the South of France. Checking in?
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