Helena Bonham Carter was poised to spend the next series of The White Lotus sipping Aperol spritzes on a striped sun lounger on the French Riviera.
Instead, the actress has checked herself out of the fourth series of the HBO drama after filming had begun — even though the part had been created for her.
Bonham Carter, 59, whose breakout role came in A Room with a View in 1985 and who has since starred in The King’s Speech and the Harry Potter franchise, had been cast alongside Vincent Cassel and Heather Graham for a season set during the Cannes Film Festival. Her role will now be rewritten and recast in the coming weeks.
“With filming just under way on season four of The White Lotus, it had become apparent that the character which Mike White created for Helena Bonham Carter did not align once on set,” said HBO in a statement.
It is unclear exactly what triggered the departure, which is unusual for a big star once filming has started, but it is believed to have been Bonham Carter’s decision.
Each season of the anthology series — part murder mystery, part social satire — unfolds in a different “White Lotus” hotel, an opulent resort where moneyed and entitled guests arrive in hope of a dream holiday, but some leave in body bags.
The fourth series will be centred on two hotels: Saint-Tropez’s Château de La Messardière, reimagined as the White Lotus du Cap, and Cannes’s art deco Hôtel Martinez, a celebrity magnet rebranded as the White Lotus Cannes.
Château de La Messardière plays host to series fourAlamy
Alamy
Trouble in paradise
This is not the first time that drama has spilled out from the scripts to the set. Most notably, White, 55, the series creator and director, fell out with the composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer, who quit the show last year just before the series three finale was released.
De Veer, 52, won three Emmys and a cult following for the White Lotus score. His theme tune for series two was even remixed as a club anthem.
He told The New York Times that he would not return for the fourth season following creative disagreements with White.
“We already had our last fight for ever, I think,” he said of White. “He was just saying no to anything.” He said that conversations with producers could be “hysterical”, and that the creative team wanted less experimental work than he wished to produce.
De Veer likened it to a falling out between bandmates: “I was like, OK, this is like a rock band I’ve been in before where the guitar player doesn’t understand the singer at all.”
Mike White has led The White Lotus to 16 EmmysFRAZER HARRISON/GETTY IMAGES
In an interview with the American broadcaster Howard Stern, White responded: “I don’t think he liked to go through the process of getting notes from me, or wanting revisions, because he didn’t respect me. I knew he wasn’t a team player and that he wanted to do it his way. I was thrown that he would go to The New York Times to shit on me and the show three days before the finale. It was kind of a bitch move.”
White, who specialises in characters who are difficult to like but enjoyable to watch on screen, began work in television in the late Nineties on the teen drama Dawson’s Creek. The White Lotus has been his biggest hit, drawing 6.2 million viewers in the US for the finale of its third season.
He has appeared twice as a contestant on the gruelling US reality show Survivor, coming second in 2018 and narrowly missing out on the $1 million prize. He has since invited some of his fellow Survivor contestants to have cameos in The White Lotus, including Natalie Cole, whom White had called “an unpleasant drain around camp” while in the jungle together.
Bonham Carter is not the first actor to exit The White Lotus. The makers of the show previously dropped the Serbian actor Milos Bikovic from the third season, after he was accused of backing Russia following its invasion of Ukraine (he denied that he supported any wars).
‘Everyone lost their marbles a little bit’
Walton Goggins as Rick and Aimee Lou Wood as Chelsea in series threeHBO
Other stars have spoken about the challenges of appearing in the series.
Aimee Lou Wood, 32, who played the guileless yoga instructor Chelsea in season 3, said that she and her co-stars found that they were starting to merge with their characters during their seven months on the set in Thailand.
“There was a bit of leakage. We were all accidentally Method,” she told The Sunday Times last year. “It has happened every season. Everyone has lost their marbles a little bit.” She added that some nights the cast would be eating dinner and realise they had just regurgitated their character’s speech.
Nonetheless, many actors are now desperate to appear in the show, attracted by the chance to play complex and dark — if sometimes absurd — characters, and as the show has become a guaranteed Emmy contender.
Jennifer Aniston told E! News in 2023 that she is “obsessed” with The White Lotus, and was thrilled at the suggestion that she could play the avenging sister of Jennifer Coolidge’s character Tanya McQuoid, a lonely heiress who died in an accident at the end of the second series, after her husband had tried (and failed) to orchestrate her death.
Hayden Panettiere, the Heroes actress, also said she wanted to star in the series “so bad … I want to do it, like Tom Cruise-jumping-on-Oprah’s-couch bad”.
HBO said: “[Bonham Carter’s] role has subsequently been rethought, is being rewritten and will be recast in the coming weeks. HBO, the producers and Mike White are saddened that they won’t get to work with her, but remain ardent fans and very much hope to work with the legendary actress on another project soon.”