The White Lotus star Will Sharpe has reflected on the show’s season two finale.
Sharpe, who plays Ethan in the second series of Mike White’s HBO anthology series, was asked about whether his character had slept with Daphne (Meghann Fahy), the wife of his college friend Cameron (Theo James) he had felt threatened by.
- READ MORE: ‘The White Lotus’ season two review: the guests are still awful, the show still utterly addictive
In the finale, Ethan and Daphne discussed whether they could trust their partners as Ethan told Daphne he believed Cameron had slept with his wife, Harper (Aubrey Plaza).
Daphne then led Ethan to explore a remote island, with it remaining unclear what happened between the two as the camera cut away.
“I feel like that’s part of what’s interesting and sort of poetic about how Mike’s handled those stories, is that there is an element of mystery still,” Sharpe said of the potential infidelity in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
“That’s what Daphne is saying to Ethan in that scene on the beach, maybe you don’t need to know everything about one another to love each other and to be with each other. From a performance point of view, with Harper and Cameron, I felt like I didn’t need to know what had happened because Ethan doesn’t know.”
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Sharpe reflected on Ethan’s paranoia, as he’s convinced Cameron and Harper had sex even after Harper admits they only kissed. “What’s fuelling the temperature in those scenes is a kind of realisation that he really wants to fight for this marriage, and he’s realised that he needs to fight for it. And this is, rightly or wrongly, his way of doing it.”
Sharpe went on: “In that moment, he just feels like he has to get the truth from Harper and maybe he does get it from her or maybe he doesn’t, we don’t know. In terms of Ethan and Daphne, the way I thought about it was whatever sort of physically happens on that island, what has happened between them undeniably is a moment of intimacy and a moment of kind of mutual vulnerability and connection.
“And something about Daphne’s own sort of self awareness and the accommodation that she has with who she is and how she lives her life, something about that affects Ethan.”
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