The White Lotus Is at Cannes Right Now and We Cannot Think of a More Perfect Setting
Photography by Stéphane Marquet
HBO’s most wickedly smart series has found its most dangerous playground yet.
Right now, as the world’s most glamorous film festival unfolds on the French Riviera, somewhere in the crowd there is a White Lotus camera crew watching all of it. That is not a metaphor. The fourth season of Mike White’s Emmy-winning HBO series is actively filming at Cannes this week, embedding itself inside the very real spectacle of the festival to tell a story about fame, art, and the particular kind of hunger that brings people to places like this in the first place.
The premise alone is enough to make you want to watch immediately. A new group of guests checks into not one but two White Lotus properties on the Côte d’Azur, the Airelles Château de la Messardière in Saint-Tropez, reimagined as the White Lotus du Cap, and the legendary Hôtel Martinez on the Croisette itself, which becomes the White Lotus Cannes. It is the first time the series has featured two hotels simultaneously, and the first time it has stepped outside the Four Seasons universe entirely. The result is a season that feels more European, more cinematic, and by all accounts considerably more unhinged.
White himself has been refreshingly direct about the direction. After the spiritual weight of Season 3 in Thailand, he has described this new chapter as wickedly playful, and has made clear that fame is the season’s central obsession. “There are some people who are satisfied with the love of one intimate partner,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “And then there are some people who need the love of strangers.” Producer David Bernad has added that the season is about the arts and what it means to be an artist, which, set against the backdrop of Cannes, suggests a very particular kind of dissection is coming.
The cast assembled for this edition is extraordinary even by White Lotus standards. Helena Bonham Carter, Vincent Cassel, Steve Coogan, Kumail Nanjiani, Chris Messina, Rosie Perez, Heather Graham, Sandra Bernhard and Max Greenfield are among those checking in, joined by French actress Nadia Tereszkiewicz and Swedish model and actress Frida Gustavsson. The cast is currently in Cannes and expected to walk the red carpet at least once during the festival, which means the line between the show’s fiction and this week’s reality is already beginning to blur in exactly the way White intended.
The season films through October, with additional locations in Monaco and Paris, though the story remains rooted in the Côte d’Azur. No release date has been announced yet, but given that White Lotus has become one of the defining cultural events of every year it airs, the wait will be closely watched.
In the meantime, the cameras are rolling on the Croisette. Everyone is performing. And somewhere in that crowd, someone is already dead.