Murray Bartlett On the Magic of Playing Armond in Mike White’s ‘The White Lotus’

The role of Armond, the recovering addict resort manager in Mike White’s brilliant satire The White Lotus, appeared “tailor-made” to the incredible talents of Emmy-nominee Murray Bartlett. When watching HBO’s 20 time Emmy-nominated anthology series, audiences could easily assume White wrote the role specifically for Bartlett. His performance boasts a truly lived-in feel, an ease and a grace that only comes when material perfectly matches performer.

The truth? It wasn’t written for Bartlett at all. In fact, Bartlett self-taped his audition for the role. The rest? Magic.

“It was just one of those great moments of coming together, of things that seemed to work. Mike is just an astounding creative mind, and he wrote this amazing character. I really connected with it when I read it,” Bartlett recalled. “I was a self tape. I had no communication with Mike or the casting director. Mike really took a risk on me as we hadn’t met. I don’t think he was familiar with my work. Instead, we just connected through the audition. Working with him was just a dreamy experience of really diving into who this character is and exploring all his facets. It just felt like it had some magic in it. I felt a great connection with the role. We had a really good connection and just had a ton of fun creating and exploring that character together.”

To play the harried, stressed, and strung-out Armond, Bartlett relied on the intricate detail of White’s script to guide the performance. Underscoring that was Bartlett’s familiarity with working in the service industry as most actors experience at some point in their growing careers. Bartlett admits to being very familiar with scenarios that happen when serving people, even the obnoxious “Shane-level” (Jake Lacy’s character) behavior those in the service industry have to endure. The mixture of that experience and White’s script gave Bartlett a strong base from which to launch his interpretation of Armond.

But one of the most impressive aspects of Bartlett’s award-winning performance (Critics’ Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie Made for Television) was his ability to maintain the increasing anxiety and drug-fueled madness Armond experiences over the course of the series.

Especially considering the series was not filmed in linear fashion.

“Well, it was beautifully written, so you’re given a lot to work with on the page, which was amazing. It was a tricky thing to shoot because we’re shooting so wildly out of sequence. I’d be doing a very subdued scene next to a crazy falling off the wagon kind of losing his shit kind of scene,” Bartlett recalls. “Because I was working with an incredibly talented, lovely group of people and with a ringleader like Mike White, there’s a sense of freedom and a permission to take risks and to really play. I felt free to really lean into those scenes where he’s losing his shit or really kind of expressing extreme emotion. Shooting it so out of sequence was a really great challenge, actually, to piece together that jigsaw puzzle and keep tabs on where he was. A fun challenge.”

Throughout the series, Bartlett shared several scenes with a variety of memorable characters featured in The White Lotus. But few perhaps drove the tension of the series as well as Armond’s interactions with Shane (Jake Lacy), a white privileged newlywed incensed that he’s (and to an extent his wife Rachel, played by Alexandra Daddario) not getting his just desserts.

It’s a toxic relationship that ultimately culminates in Armond’s untimely death.

But in playing those scenes, Bartlett and Lacy found a common thread in how they tended to over-prepare for a scene. They both came to set ready to play and discovered after shooting their very first scene that they had a connection and a chemistry that tended to push each other further into their brutally comic seething rage.

But what drives both men to seemingly one-up each other in their constantly devolving man-boyishness?

“To me, it felt like this archetypal setup of a bully and a bullied where the bullied has had it, and he’s just not going to take it anymore. The bully in this situation is just so entitled, so used to winning, and knows, ultimately, he has the upper hand always. He’s rich and good looking, and there’s a ton of power in that. So, I think it’s a perfect storm in a way of these two people who are just unwilling to back down. Shane’s sort of state of mind amped up by the situation that his new marriage is starting to get rocky. [Armond’s] on a point of a nervous breakdown. He really came to represent to me sort of all the aspects of myself that are kind of overwhelmed by all the stuff that we’re dealing with at the moment, politically, environmentally, and culturally. This unsustainable road that we seem to be on in many ways, and this part of us that is like, ‘This is insane. I cannot do this anymore.’ It’s the final straw of another one of these entitled, bully characters coming at him, and he’s like, ‘I can’t do it anymore.’ ”

Which, of course, culminates in the water-cooler moment of Armond taking a massive dump in Shane’s suitcase.

To Bartlett, that moment is a classic representation of Mike White’s writing allowing his characters to go to extremes as human beings tend to do. Yet, he doesn’t consider the moment that different than how other characters within The White Lotus treat each other. Armond’s just a bit more literal.

“It’s not that different from other parts of the story where characters are metaphorically taking a shit on each other. Just really treating each other like shit, and so I think it’s an extension of that. It drives home the dynamics that are going on in this scenario, this oppressive pyramid scheme of a society where the people, the privileged people, at the top just can do whatever the hell they want, and everyone else just has to deal with it,” Bartlett remarks. “The irony of it is that he turns around and treats the people below him like shit too. Sometimes, I think he’s got a bit more self awareness and shame, for sure, but he’s still does it. We’re caught in this system of feeling entitled, and we can treat people who we think of as ‘below us’ in a way that’s just crappy.”

Aside from that scene (and that other scene that took Twitter by storm — you know the one — that Bartlett says “makes an impact because it’s shocking to most”), Bartlett’s journey as Armond reaches operatic heights in the season finale. Loaded with ketamine snorted like cocaine, Armond floats through his final night of resort dinner service, pouring wine and chatting up the guests with gusto and aplomb.

It’s a brilliant, surreal moment that perfectly caps Bartlett’s brilliant, surreal performance.

“That’s an actor’s dream in a way doing a scene like that. We had an incredible camera crew who became my dance partners in that scene, which was just so fun. Mike White gave me the gift of blasting that music while we were shooting that whole sequence, so it was really dreamy and wonderful. I felt kind of high doing it just because there was this amazing music playing, and I’m doing this sort of surreal dance. It was pretty fantastic to shoot.”

The White Lotus streams exclusively on HBO Max.