The White Lotus fans have been abuzz all week with the revelation that Season 3’s snooty Ratliff family are actually based on the real Bravo reality stars of Southern Charm. The White Lotus‘s Sam Nivola spilled to PEOPLE earlier this week that he and his costars were specifically told by series creator/director/writer Mike White to watch the Bravo hit, prompting fans of both shows to draw parallels between HBO‘s fictional Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs) and Charleston’s own Thomas Ravenel.
“I don’t want to give him too much credit,” The White Lotus star Jason Isaacs said during a recent visit to DECIDER HQ. “I don’t want Thomas Ravenel suing me for what ever pennies I have left from the show.”
In fact, during our in-studio chat with Isaacs, he revealed that The White Lotus/Southern Charm connection is a bit more complicated than you might think.
“It is true that [Mike White] initially said to me, ‘Here’s a guy you might want to look at.’ And I looked at Thomas Ravenel,” Isaacs said. But he didn’t actually watch Southern Charm.
“I wanted to hear his voice, the accent. So I looked at some of his political campaigning interviews.” Isaacs was quick to add that it couldn’t be a 1:1 impression of Ravenel because Timothy Ratliff is from Durham, North Carolina, not Charleston.
He also confirmed that and rest of the Ratliffs — Victoria (Parker Posey), Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), and Lochlan (Sam Nivola) — are from Charlotte.
“And so [Thomas Ravenel] was very useful for a lot of stuff, but not useful for the accent,” Isaacs said.
What was Thomas Ravenel “useful” for? Well, future episodes of The White Lotus Season 3 delve into just how important the Ratliffs are to their community, with Timothy revealing in Episode 4 that his grandfather was governor of North Carolina. The parallels were in that “general sense of entitlement.”
“He’s that thing that Tom Wolfe called the big finance men in Wall Street: He’s a ‘Big Swinging Dick,'” Isaacs said. “He’s the Big Swinging Dick of Durham and everything that he is, everything he’s ever thought about himself, about how he sees himself in the world, is about how other people see where he is status wise.”
“His wife is such a terrible snob, but so is he. He puts up with it, he laughs at it,” he said. “And suddenly the rug is pulled out from under him and from under his kids.”
During our chat, Isaacs revealed that Timothy is “really loves his kids,” but definitely has a favorite. “It’s Piper. It’s my girl, my daughter, you know?”
“He’s madly in love with his kids and the idea of the dynasty continuing,” Isaacs said. “As the week unfolds, he begins to worry about his kids in a very different way. Like, ‘Who have I raised?'”
“He takes time to spend time with each of them and see whether what he thinks might be coming, this devastation, that they could they could float above it. Have they got what it takes?”
Maybe if Saxon, Piper, and Lochlan manage to survive their week at The White Lotus, there could be a future in a SoCharm-esque reality TV show for them.
The White Lotus Season 3 Episode 3 “The Meaning of Dreams” will premiere on HBO and MAX this Sunday, March 2 at 9 PM ET.