The White Lotus trailer: Release date for Thailand-based season three of HBO comedy-drama revealed

It’s going to be hot and sticky in more ways than one.

The White Lotus has released the first trailer for its third season, which moves the action to a wellness resort in Thailand. The series will be released on February 17 on Binge.

Creator Mike White has revealed little about the upcoming instalment, other than that it will take a satirical scalpel to “death and Eastern religion and spirituality”, presumably from the perspective of how Westerners co-opt these concepts.

In a voice-over, a character warns, “Everyone runs from pain towards pleasure, but they get there only to find more pain”.

The minute-and-a-half-long video introduces the audience to a swathe of new characters and also features a familiar face. Natasha Rothwell, who was in the first season set in Hawaii, returns as Belinda, who tells the audience that she is on an exchange program within The White Lotus network.

The ensemble includes three friends on a girls trip, played by Carrie Coon, Leslie Bibb and Michelle Monaghan. There are some inherent tension between them with the trailer featuring a snide remark from Coon’s Laurie about Monaghan’s Jaclyn.

There’s the rich family with Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey as the parents while their adult children are portrayed by Sarah Catherine Hook and nepo babies Patrick Schwarzenegger (son of Arnold) and Sam Nivola (son of Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola).

Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Wood are an age-gap couple on holidays. He is dismissive of the resort’s commitment to wellness – “Gluten-free rice and coconut balls, what are we, at a f**king fat farm?!”. No one tell him that all rice is gluten-free.

The Thai characters including resort staff are played by Lalisa Manobal (also known as Lisa from Blackpink), Tayme Thapthimthong, Lek Patravadi and Dom Hetrakul.

The season will run for eight episodes and was filmed in Koh Samui, Phuket and Bangkok. Production was delayed by the 2023 Hollywood writers strike. White had not finished the scripts when the strike was called.

The White Lotus functions as something of an anthology show in that each season is set in a different location (the second was in Sicily) with new characters and a fresh focus. Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya McQuoid connected the first two chapters but she was (two-year-old spoiler alert) killed off.

White has already pitched a fourth season to the network, HBO.