‘The White Lotus’ returns for Season 2, slowed down and sexed up…
Season 1 of “The White Lotus” was a powerful and mesmerizing look at the life of a man who grew up in a culture as rigid and rigidly sex-negative as the “White Lotus” cult. But in the time since its debut, the series was cut short in a major way — one that left the cult behind and opened the doors to a new, more mainstream audience.
In Season 2, set 10 years on, a second group of men who have learned their power in the White Lotus fold must return to the secret world on the surface. The man who masterminded the entire sex-negative movement and was an original member has disappeared, and his former underling (and one of the series’ primary antagonists) has returned to the White Lotus. Together, they battle the dark forces and make their way back to the surface.
But with a new season of “The White Lotus” comes an opportunity to revisit the original, with some of the original cast members. The White Lotus’s cast remained fairly consistent throughout Seasons 1 and 2, although the show was forced to replace two of the leads before Season 2 even began.
The actors who were originally scheduled to appear in Season 2: Tom Towles, Kevin Stromme, Jana S. Clark, Alex Mallari, Jennifer Lien, and Robert Taylor. But with Towles in the middle of directing a feature film — an action-thriller he is co-writing with screenwriter Eric Roth — and the other cast members involved in other projects, including Clark and Mallari in indie films and S.C.U.M.E. in “Deadline,” production was slowed down at the last minute, and some of the cast dropped out.
But the series has grown a lot since TOWLES and his co-writer, Roth, began writing “The White Lotus” series. The show has taken on a new look with the help of filmmaker Adam Wingard, who helmed the visuals for the first two seasons, and the crew has also grown with a new cinematographer in Rob Hardy.
While the cast’s departures might have been devastating to fans who were counting down the days until their favorite characters returned, Wingard is still putting
