Spoilers for The White Lotus below.
Leslie Bibb isn’t ready to watch the White Lotus season 3 finale yet. Part of that has to do with those brutal on-screen deaths; she can’t bear to watch her dear friends suffer, even in a fictional way. “Aimee Lou [Wood] has become so kindred with me, and Walton [Goggins] is like family. I can’t see anything happen to them,” she admits.
But she also knows that once she finishes that last episode, it will all really be over: her seven months filming in Thailand, the time she spent bonding with Mike White and her co-stars, and the deep emotional work she put into her character, Kate. Closing this chapter would feel like another death.
“This whole experience has just been amazing, and so I still want to hold onto it a little bit longer,” Bibb says the day after the finale aired. “I can’t kill anything.”
Fortunately, Kate wasn’t a killer (or killed) either. She and her friends, Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Laurie (Carrie Coon), make it out of their Thai vacation alive, with an even deeper connection than before. After a week of gossiping, fake politeness, and hurtful remarks, the three childhood pals reach a breakthrough when Laurie lets her walls down. She admits she’s been sad on this trip because she had lost her belief system and so easily compared her life and choices to her friends’. But it also made her realize that time, including the decades-long friendship she’s forged with these women, gives her life meaning. “I look at you guys and it feels meaningful,” she says. Kate’s eyes well up with tears as she and the rest of the trio move forward on a more transparent note. It’s a rare happy ending for The White Lotus, but fitting for this fan-favorite storyline.
Instead of spending their trip judging and participating in passive-aggressive competition, what these women really needed all along was some honesty. According to Bibb, they could have even learned something from Frank’s strange speech (which was delivered by her real-life partner, Sam Rockwell). “That’s why I like the Frank monologue, because he was so unapologetic.” She adds, “It felt like, ‘Oh, wow, if the three women had just come in and said their truth from the beginning, would there be any gossiping?’”
Thanks to Bibb—known for roles in Talladega Nights, Popular, and more recently, Palm Royale and Juror #2—Kate felt like a real person you’d come across in real life; a successful woman, wife, and mother with questionable politics and insecurities hiding under her perfect facade. “She’s so scared of not being loved, of rejection, that she just can’t say her truth,” Bibb says. Her performance was so compelling to watch that White Lotus fans gave her the ultimate honorific: naming her sharp blonde haircut the “cunty little bob.” Bibb smiles. “I love that people love that. The CLB.”
When she was on set, however, the actress wasn’t actively thinking about the show’s cultural impact or massive fanbase. “I was just like, Don’t fuck up,” she recalls. “This is a beloved show, and I wanted to just be prepared and do a good job. I really loved this character of Kate, and I wanted to make sure I did her service. I was in service of her and her story, and I wanted to make Mike happy and I wanted to make myself happy.” Who can blame her for not wanting it to be over?
Below, Bibb walks us through the White Lotus finale, where the “blonde blob” ends up, and her advice for trios going on girls’ trips.
What was your reaction when you read the finale script for the first time?
I was just like, “Holy shit. Mike. Fucking. White.” I don’t want to sound sycophantic when I say this, but I really think the man is a genius, and I think he’s brilliant. No one looks at relationships, the human condition, and human connection the way he does, and as honestly as he does. I find he does something incredible, which is he is able to look at each character and he doesn’t judge them. He sort of holds them, and it’s really hard.
I was seeing people’s reactions, just saying it was incredible how this trio of women started and how we thought we knew who they were, but now you’re like, I didn’t know anything. And how harshly you judge them and then you’re like, oh, wait. They really do have a real friendship. They really do see each other for who they are, and they see each other through their flaws and their successes and their capabilities as well as their incapabilities. And I think that’s what a true friendship should be.
One of my favorite moments of the episode was Laurie’s monologue, saying that she measures her life not by religion, work, or romance, but by time and her friendships.
Really beautiful, right?
What was it like filming that scene?
I just remember that day feeling like, so alive. So in the moment with each of them. And really connected to Carrie and Michelle. I think I called Sam and said, “I don’t know if I’ve ever had a day like that on set.” It was just brimming. It was our connection as the three of us.
I mean, Mike’s writing, if you just listen to it and let it wash over you, it does half the work, but also, it’s the performances of Carrie and Michelle, the three of us. I am really proud of us, as corny and self-congratulatory as that sounds.
Somebody asked me about our storyline and I was like, oh, I worried it possibly could come off boring—not that it was boring—because the other stories are very dramatic. They’re very biblical and Greek and Shakespearean at times. I sort of did exactly what everybody else did; I judged it, I compared it. I was like, oh God, are we just gossipers? That was just when I read the script. But when we were starting to film, I was like, something’s happening. And it felt very dramatic too.
When you’re reading it on a page, you’re like, oh my God, the brothers! Oh my God, money embezzling! Oh my God, that monologue by Frank! Oh my God, the boat scene! And I was like, are our three little monkeys going to be as captivating?
But it was, and you guys were so many people’s favorites.
That’s what I’m saying. I realized, oh, you’re just looking at first glance. And then I got to Thailand, we started to work, and I started to lock into something really deep. Something happened [in that scene] when I wake from a dream and I go out and I hear [Jaclyn and Laurie] talking shit about me. We shot that the first two weeks we were there. For me, I realized how deep this story was. I was like, oh, this is about abandonment. This is about self-worth. The way Mike writes, you think, as an audience member, oh, these women are just gossiping. And then slowly with every episode, you drop in [deeper].
You got in on some of the action as well. You guys were present when the shoot-out began and ran away. What do you remember from filming that scene?
How fast Carrie [ran]. I remember laughing and also realizing, oh yeah, Laurie fucking leaves us. Laurie’s out.
She sprinted!
And then I was like, oh yeah, Kate is going to be freaked out. She’s worried about being abandoned, and this friendship is so important. She just wants to be included. And I know what that feels like. And she has imposter syndrome. What she presents to the world is, “I got this together,” and underneath, she’s incredibly scared. Hence the reason she controls everything, hence the reason she’s a perfectionist.
But I think when push comes to shove, that girl is the connector of those friends. … Kate’s going to be the one who you call if you need somebody to get you out of jail. And Kate’s the one you call when you’re sick. She’s going to hold your hair when you’re throwing up in the bathroom. She’s a really good friend, I think, to them.
What do you imagine Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie’s lives are like after this vacation?
I was thinking, would she go home and tell [her husband] Dave and her friends in Austin that three people got shot and killed? I think she wouldn’t, because what’s more important is that the trip was amazing and that we were connected. … I think she goes home, and she’s there to talk to Laurie and Jaclyn if they need her. But all she’s going to talk about is the water gun fight, this dance party she went to and it was really wild, and these crazy Russians who came back to our house.
In this show, a lot is said by what is not said. I think your, “Did you vote for Trump?” smile should be hung in the Louvre. Everybody was so obsessed with it, but it says so much about Kate’s inner conflict and what she’s trying to present. And apparently you didn’t even rehearse that reaction in the mirror?
I personally don’t work like that, so I don’t know what face I did. I mean, I’ve seen the face because people have shown me the face.
You’ve seen the memes.
I just was like, “Oh, my God. That’s the face I made?” I had no idea. It just happened.
It’s a complicated moment, I think, for Kate. There are a lot of things happening. I think she’s trying to normalize what she says about her husband [being a Republican]; she’s like, “I’m an independent.” She’s scared that her two friends are going to drop her because it’s new information. So clearly, she knows that this is going to be a Molotov cocktail in her friend group. I think she doesn’t want to alienate her friends, and yet at the same time, she wants to be able to talk about stuff, but there’s not room for that, because there’s a divide between them. They already think she’s a dummy, and she’s aware of that. They’re already dismissing her.
I think there’s a lot of fear and pressure. … I think she doesn’t know how to live her life unapologetically, which I can relate to. And I think a lot of people can. You think living your life unapologetically is like, “Here I am!” But really, it rests in risking vulnerability, risking being seen. I don’t know about you, but that’s really scary to me.
I read that you helped Sam go off-book with his monologue during a safari?
Sammy and I, it’s a silly thing, but we have a rule. … Try to keep it no more than three weeks apart. And lately, we’ve been really lucky. Both of us have been working a lot, which has been great, but we’ve been shooting in very far-off places.
He was doing a play in New York when I started White Lotus, and then he was going to come see me, but then a movie he’d been in prep on for two years suddenly got greenlit. So he went to South Africa, and I was meant to go see him, and we kept pushing and pushing [the trip]. ... It’s a big monologue. He was like, “How am I going to memorize this?” Because in the movie he was doing, he had a 14-minute monologue. So he was a little like, “I don’t know if I can do it.”
I knew I was going to see him [where he was filming in South Africa], and we were going to go on a safari, which was so exciting. So I was like, “I’ll get you off-book.” It’s not a sexy process. There’s no acting. You just drill lines. We’d do a game drive in the morning, then come back, have breakfast. There are no TVs when you’re out in the bush. So I was like, “We’ve got plenty of time.”
That’s so funny. I was picturing you in a Jeep with the animals around you.
We were not doing it there. No, we were very present in that. By the way, you couldn’t memorize anything on a safari when there’s a lioness right there.
Do you have any advice for girls’ trips? If you’re a three-person group, are you automatically doomed?
You all have to go to therapy before. Literally, everybody has to go to therapy—for at least six months before the trip.
Here’s one of the tenets for a girls’ trip: Don’t share rooms, because if you each go to your own room, you can’t triangulate. You can’t be like, “Erica and Leslie are sharing a room and then Becky has her own room.” Because what are we going to do in the room? We’re going to talk about the day and something’s going to happen.
Any final thoughts about Kate or White Lotus this season?
Can I just tell you what I think is really cool? How people have really connected to the women.
I think it’s a reminder how powerful female stories are, and not just female stories for 20-year-olds. Not that there’s anything wrong with the coming of age and all of that. There’s this old idea about women, that your prime is in the beginning. And I really think for every woman, the aging process is really interesting. Everybody goes through it, right? It’s like death. You can’t avoid it.
I hope that young women sort of look at this and they’re like, “Is that going to be us when we get a little older?” All stages of a woman’s life are very interesting. I am really proud to be a part of that if that’s happening in the zeitgeist right now, to be a part of that reminder about women.
I think women are incredible. I just think to be a woman is so fucking cool. You can have babies, you can do everything. I mean, we can actually do more than that. And it’s not a competition. I just love it. And I really am grateful that Mike White writes these complicated, interesting women. I feel very grateful that I got to be a part of his acting troupe this season and tell this story. It’s been really fun.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
