Note: This story contains spoilers from “The White Lotus” Season 3, Episode 5.
After watching Jason Isaacs’ Timothy spiral throughout “The White Lotus” Season 3, the character attempts to take his fate back into his own hands in Episode 5 — an impulse Isaacs said lingers throughout the rest of the season.
In Episode 5, Timothy silently mulls over his future — which is likely going to include prison and frozen assets — and comes to the realization that ending his own life might be his best option. At the end of the episode, Timothy writes a suicide note to his family before pulling the gun he stole from Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) to his head. At the last second, however, he is interrupted by his wife, Victoria (Parker Posey).
“He was about to pull the trigger, when Victoria walks in and he didn’t want her to see it — he left her a note. He wanted her to find it,” Isaacs told TheWrap. “[It’s] the banality, the normality [of] the two of them going to bed … He’s not going to turn around and go, ‘I was just about to kill myself, darling, go back to bed.’ So he can’t do it then.”
“And then the moment’s gone for him, because you have to work up a lot to kill yourself,” he continued. “But I don’t think suicidal instinct has gone at all for him.”
From where Timothy sits, the “easiest answer” to solve his predicament is “to not be in the world,” Isaacs said. “He cannot imagine life without the money and status and privilege and legacy that he has.”
It’s not only his own fate that is sending Timothy into a downwards spiral, but also the future of his wife, who has repeatedly mentioned life wouldn’t be worth living without her current luxuries. “One of the things that so terrifies him [is] not just that they’re all going to be poor and they have no idea how to be poor people, but that in doing this thing, he’s not just done it to himself — it was the house, the car, the money, the bank accounts, their assets are frozen,” Isaacs said. “There’s literally nothing.”
“Maybe she has to die too,” Isaacs said. “And that’s a terrible thing, but maybe it’s the best way.”
Timothy’s worries also extend to his three children, with Isaacs saying “everything that he is is being the patriarch … having a legacy of this generational wealth and being the man that they look up to and being able to help and advise his children.”
While Isaacs noted that plan does not seamlessly work on Timothy’s two younger children, he’s “very worried” about his eldest child Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), whom Timothy is “pretty sure” won’t be able to “survive” once his money and status is peeled back, with Isaacs noting “he’s so obsessed with it.”
“[Saxon] seems to be aping positions thinking that he’s doing what [Timothy] likes, but [Timothy is] not particularly impressed by how vacuous his life is,” Isaacs said, noting that Timothy has been married for a long time while Saxon is chasing women. “He’s in [Timothy’s] shadow and trying to remake himself in [Timothy’s] image, but not his own.”
Isaacs noted that Timothy “wishes he’d raised children that could survive without money and status and that that wasn’t the thing that buoyed them up.” “His whole life has been a failure when he thought he was a success,” Isaacs said.
For Isaacs, playing a character in an “extreme situation under extraordinary pressure” is “cathartic,” joking “maybe we do it because it’s cheap therapy for us.”
“Mike’s created this fantastic character in that he has a huge secret that’s burning him from inside that’s imploding,” he said. “Everything that he is in the world looks like it’s gonna be lost.”
“The White Lotus” airs Sundays on HBO and Max.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 988 is a free, 24/7 confidential service that can provide people in suicidal crisis or emotional distress, or those around them, with support, information and local resources.
The post ‘The White Lotus’ Star Jason Isaacs Says Timothy’s ‘Suicidal Instinct’ Isn’t Gone After Episode 5 appeared first on TheWrap.