The White Lotus star Murray Bartlett is very much open to returning to the show after his character’s memorable death in Season 1.
Bartlett told Obsessed: The Podcast that even though his character, Armond, died, he has an idea or two that could justify bringing him back in an upcoming “all-star” season. Armond, the uptight manager of the fictional resort’s Maui location, was—spoiler alert!—accidentally stabbed in the chest by Shane Patton, a hotel guest played by Jake Lacy.
The wound proved fatal to the character but was a huge boon to his career, as the actor won a Primetime Emmy Award in 2022 for the role.
As for rumors of an upcoming all-star cast return to the show, Bartlett was skeptical but game to imagine a way in for Armond.
“I wonder where those things come from, whether there’s anything, whether it comes from,” he said, wondering if a big return was “something that could be real.”
“But, I mean, from the mind of Mike, quite honestly, it could happen in the afterlife,” he said. “You really don’t know. And the night before we started shooting the first season, we had this big dinner, and he announced that there would be a prize for the person who, at the end of the shoot, was the nicest person and the best actor, and they’d get a spin-off series,” Bartlett recalled.
“And I was like, hello!” Bartlett, who already knew his character’s tragic fate, joked. “And he was like, ‘We could just go back in time.’ So who knows? Maybe I could appear in flashbacks. Maybe it’ll be, I don’t know, parallel realms that you visit. I mean, he could really do anything.”
White has collected three Emmy trophies for the series, all for the first season, including for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, as well as the writing and directing categories in 2022. The series has won 16 Emmy Awards across all three seasons so far.
The fourth is expected to premiere in early to mid-2027, and will be set at the Cannes Film Festival in France. The upcoming season will star Laura Dern—who joined the cast to replace Helena Bonham Carter after her shock departure—Sir Ben Kingsley, Max Greenfield, Kumail Nanjiani, Chris Messina, and Steve Coogan.
Bartlett said he is eagerly anticipating the new season, like the rest of the fans. “The seasons have been different, and there’s been different reactions to them…every season has been amazing. So I’m excited to see what happens next.”
That said, he was not expecting the show to become as popular as it did when they were filming it, he told Obsessed. “It was shocking and amazing that it resonated so intensely with people,” he added.
Bartlett’s latest series, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, just aired its climactic Season 1 finale on Apple TV. It stars Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany as a newly divorced magazine fact-checker who witnesses a crime online and is subsequently sucked into a world of murder and blackmail. Bartlett plays her cunning antagonist named Dennis in the comedic crime thriller.
“He’s a chameleon, really. He just shape-shifts to get what he wants in whatever situation he’s in,” Bartlett said of his character. “It’s a really well-written character, I think, and it’s an amazing thing for an actor to have this character that you get to play all these different things through this one character.”
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is now streaming on Apple TV.
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