In Sunday’s episode of The White Lotus, viewers got a look inside a monastery when Piper and Lochlan Ratliff (played by Sarah Catherine Hook and Sam Nivola) leave the hotel property — and their unraveling family — for a night of meditation and reckoning.
The HBO series’ costume designer, Alex Bovaird, said the scenes shot inside the monastery were challenging to dress but playful.
“That was really fun,” Bovaird told Yahoo Entertainment about dressing the actors playing monks in traditional orange robes, with some strict limitations.
“[They wore] sacred garments that I was respectfully asked not to touch with my hands. My male staff could wrap them only,” she said.
Suthichai Yoon plays monk Luang Por Teera in The White Lotus. (Fabio Lovino/HBO)
At the monastery, Piper and Lochlan agree to spend the night as part of a challenge set forth by their mom, Victoria (Parker Posey) — a ploy to show Piper just how uncomfortable a Buddhist lifestyle can be as she makes the case for her plans to live there for a year after college graduation.
Sarah Catherine Hook and Parker Posey during Season 3, Episode 6 of The White Lotus. (Fabio Lovino/HBO)
Meanwhile, Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon), Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) and Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) revisit their late-night partying that ended on a yacht. For Bovaird, those are some of her favorite scenes to costume.
“I love party scenes,” she said. “Sometimes in real life, you go to these hotels and people are actually wearing sweatpants. But we don’t do that in our show. There’s a heightened energy that we bring to our clothes.”
Party scenes also mean more background actors, which can take some time.
“We put a lot into dressing the extras,” she said. “There’s a lot of prefitting. They come in days before everybody. You don’t always see it, because TV is quite tight and there’s a lot of intensity to how the characters are feeling, so you get a lot of close-ups.”
She continued: “The cast really appreciates it because they feel that they’re in all those party scenes, there’s hundreds of extras, and they’re all in some crazy outfits. So it helps them feel like they’re really in a club in Phuket.”
Sam Nivola and Patrick Schwarzenegger in The White Lotus. (Fabio Lovino/HBO)
The party energy isn’t slowing down. Bovaird said viewers can look forward to an upcoming party scene in Bangkok that features one of her favorite looks of the season.
“There is another party coming up with another chance to make people look fabulous,” she said. “One of my favorite outfits on Chloe is at the party. She wears a really fun thing.”
There’s also an upcoming episode featuring a scene at a Bangkok strip club. Though Bovaird was cautious not to give away spoilers, she acknowledged the trickiness of outfitting actors for shoots like these.
“That’s always fun to put people in clothes that they can take off,” she said.
Bovaird said that the clothes are integral to the storytelling in Season 3.
“We’re always thinking about the clothes telling the story, always. Even if you don’t notice it, there’s a lot of thought that goes right through,” she said. “My job is to serve [creator Mike White], serve the characters, serve the story. I’m truly honored that I get to go and live out these amazing experiences that are really hard, but really fulfilling.”
She added, “I get to be a part of this cultural phenomenon. I really enjoy being, you know, a small part of the story.”
The White Lotus airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET and streams on Max.
