Haley Lu Richardson shares who she'd cast for The White Lotus’ third season

Not much is yet known about the third season of the Emmy-award-winning anthology series, but creator Mike White teased some of his ideas after the season finale aired. “The first season kind of highlighted money, and then the second season is sex,” he explained. “I think the third season would be maybe a satirical and funny look at death and Eastern religion and spirituality. It feels like it could be a rich tapestry to do another round at White Lotus.”

As for the season that just concluded, Richardson tells The A.V. Club that she knew who was going to die all along, but it wasn’t her focus—instead, she was reading each script with “so much empathy for Portia,” as is, arguably, her job to do. “We got all seven episodes up front, and then we filmed the whole show completely out of order, so it was literally like a, I don’t know, 800-page movie or something that we did for five months all over the place,” she shares. “Which was really hard, I’ve never done anything like before. It was hard to like, keep my shit together. As Haley and Portia.”

Portia managed to keep her shit together enough to make it out of Italy alive, which is more than can be said for—spoiler—her employer. And Haley managed to check a major item off her bucket list, which was working with White. You can hear Haley explain how she manifested her collaboration with the White Lotus mastermind above.