The White Lotus season 3 may have been set in hot and kinky Thailand, but that doesn’t mean it lacked family values. 

Dressed in a lacy white gown with black trim evoking a Southern gothic look, Parker Posey revealed how showrunner/ director Mike White prepared her for the role as Victoria Ratliff in HBO’s The White Lotus season 3. 

“Think Big Edie from Grey Gardens,” she recounted him saying.

Seated onstage at the DGA theater with castmates Carrie Coon, Leslie Bibb, Sam Rockwell, Walton Goggins,Tayme Thapthimthong, Jason Isaacs, Patrick Schwartzenegger, Sam Nivola, and Sarah Catherine Hook for a Q&A following a screening of episode 5 when her daughter exposes a ruse. She had conned her family into vacationing at the ultra-luxurious Thailand retreat so she can meditate on joining a Buddhist meditation center. Drama queen mom knows best. Parker, a master at drug-woozy drawls, applied Big Edie parenting wisdom knowing one night in deprivation no matter the spiritual reward is too much for the privileged draws the line at poverty:“You go right ahead.”

Patrick Schwartzenegger said, “I worked with Parker Posey before, on the HBO series The Staircase. When we first saw each other now, she immediately asked, “How’s my son? What body part do you walk with?” Posey had heard about Schwartzenegger’s physicality in the part. The cast egged her on to repeat his answer. She demurred coining a term, “He walks with his mansplain.”

The Screen Actors Guild members were rapt hearing the ensemble’s take on living in the five-star set, in close quarters with one another in preparation, a tv family. Leslie Bibb in a baby doll dress said she helped Sam Rockwell learn the lines of his super-calibrated monologue while they were on safari. Frank’s monologue, deeply troubling to Goggins’ Rick, reveals the actors’ shorthand.

Hearing that, Jason Isaacs had monologue-envy. It’s easier to have lines, but all he does is brood, imagining killing his family and then himself. How did he prepare? The actor said he just thought of his own children. In fact, they came to the set. “Who wouldn’t want to come to a five-star hotel in Thailand?” he said. “When I suggested we invite the kids to dinner with us, they said, ‘We are your kids.’”

Sam Nivola called The White Lotus acting boot camp. He learned from everybody, he said. His character Lochlan allegedly has sex with his elder brother Saxon (Schwartzenegger). Meticulous to the end, White insisted the brothers return to the family villa wearing each other’s shorts. Catching up with young Nivola at the Russian Tea Room afterparty, where only those with yellow wrist bands were invited, I asked how his parents, actors Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer, reacted to the salacious scene. Sam, now twenty-two, was anxious watching with them. “I’m lucky,” he said with diplomacy, “to have grown up in an actor environment.” They took it in.