There’s a familiar face in Mike White’s buzzy new HBO dramedy The White Lotus that may lull audiences into a false sense of security. It’s Jake Lacy, who’s got a long history of playing the sweet, stable love interest opposite complicated, messy female protagonists in The Office, Obvious Child, Girls, High Fidelity, and more. He’s so famous for playing nice guys that Vulture made a list about it. But almost immediately in The White Lotus, it’s apparent that this Lacy character is different. 

He’s wearing bright pink frat bro shorts, but not his trademark Lacy grin. As if that weren’t enough of a red flag, his brusque, unsmiling delivery of an early line—“No offense? Leave me the fuck alone”—should let you know that White’s show will make you rethink your favorite onscreen good guy. 

In White Lotus, Lacy is playing Shane Patton, one of several well-heeled vacationers at the titular, exclusive resort in Hawaii. Shane is on his honeymoon with his lovely bride Rachel (Alexandra Daddario)—but like most of the privileged guests at this luxurious hotel, Shane is extremely unhappy with his lot in life. His big problem? The hotel has booked him into a slightly less palatial suite than the one his mother promised him. 

Shane has several obnoxious angles, all of which Lacy attacks with gusto. The actor spoke with Vanity Fair about upending the Nice Guy trope, what it was like to film White Lotus during the pandemic, and about Aaron Sorkin’s upcoming film Being the Ricardos, starring Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem as Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. 

Vanity Fair: When High Fidelity was released, you discussed your history of playing nice guy boyfriends and said you were hoping to play characters who were a little more interesting—less like “just wallpaper,” I think is how you put it. 

Jake Lacy: As I hear that back I’m like, “Don’t say that stuff, Jake. Don’t say ‘just wallpaper’ to people. Come on, man.”

Well, I think High Fidelity did fulfill that prompt. But White Lotus is obviously something very different. How intentional was that choice for you? Were you looking to blow up your nice guy persona?  

I was thrilled that it was different, but it was not as specific as “I will no longer do stable boyfriend roles.” My history doing supportive, stable guys lends itself to Shane in White Lotus, because he thinks he is that guy. He thinks he’s this catch. You have that person also behaving as a petulant child. I like that dichotomy more than just a person who looks like a villain, being a villain. That has its place. It’s also fun to have someone that seems affable to be a little gross. You just wanna be like, buddy, let it go with the room. You have everything else. 

Did you happen to see Promising Young Woman? It’s a parade of stable, nice guy boyfriend actors. I was like, where’s Jake Lacy? 

Honestly, it was a scheduling thing. I was shooting High Fidelity at the time. I really wanted to be a part of it. I did see it, and loved what they did. But, yes—nice guy goes bad, come on! I read an interview with Emerald Fennell where she said she wanted to cast these familiar faces, particularly from TV. Audiences are a little more vulnerable to those people being gross because you’ve invited us into your home. To then have that face be the smiling face of sexual assault is really unnerving. 

Were they looking at you for the role that Bo Burnham played or a different one?

No, no. A different one. 

Shane in White Lotus is a similar bait and switch. We get bad vibes off him immediately, but because of your background and because there are these moments where he thinks he’s just going to provide for her, I kept rooting for him to figure it out. 

He’s not particularly palatable and isn’t particularly generous, but he’s not a liar and he’s not gaslighting anyone—which makes it even more complicated for me to understand how I feel about these people and their place in the world. I see how they got there, but it doesn’t mean I like what it is. Shane’s relationship to Rachel...like, he wants to have sex with his wife. There is no problem with that. But if that’s all there is and it’s exclusively for you and not the other person, then it starts to be a problem. 

I was reading an old interview Mike White gave about why he was so fascinated with reality television. He said something about how in the juiciest version of the genre, there’s just a tremendous lack of self-awareness. Watching White Lotus, so many of these characters are infected with that lack of self-awareness. 

The best of White Lotus is when people are going about their lives, and they don’t know they’re being awful. I wish I had been more keyed-in on that. As a viewer, what I like in voyeurism is a person who has no clue how terrible they are. Whether it’s in a movie or on the street. 

If you were in the lobby of a hotel and overheard your character, Shane, you might get this electric charge thinking at least you’re not as bad as he is. You can feel so morally superior, right? 

It gives you the moral high ground, but I hope the high ground doesn’t last. I hope that people are watching and think, “Oh man, I’m a part of that.” 

So what was the process, shooting this in Hawaii in the middle of COVID? 

They had made arrangements with the state that we were quarantined for a certain amount of time, and then with a number of tests would be allowed out of our rooms. But we weren’t ever allowed to leave the hotel grounds. For the first half, we were the only people at the hotel. There were no guests, and there was a very small number of staff. So the concern of getting COVID was pretty low; we were all just there with one another. Fred [Hechinger] and Steve [Zahn] and I would have dinner together every night. 

So then you go to work on Aaron Sorkin’s new film, Being the Ricardos. Your character and his partners created and wrote all of I Love Lucy. I feel like history has erased them from the equation.  

Yeah! So I play Bob Carroll Jr., who along with Madelyn Pugh [played by Alia Shawkat] and Jess Oppenheimer [played by Tony Hale] wrote every episode of I Love Lucy. Which is nuts, when you think of how many episodes they were doing per season. Aaron Sorkin, who wrote and directed it, was very keen to say this is a painting, not a photograph. This is not a Ken Burns documentary. Most importantly, it’s a guy who is never seen or heard, and has his entire life tethered to these two people. If they go down, he goes down. 

How do you mean? 

The story is that—and it’s true—in a single week of I Love Lucy, [Ball] was accused of being a communist, at the peak of McCarthyism, and Desi was accused of sleeping with call girls. Also, she was pregnant with her second child and had to go to CBS and say, “You’re going to do something you’ve never done and put a pregnant woman on television.” And this all happened in 48 hours. No one associated with the show knew whether they would even shoot on Friday, or whether these two would ever work again. So that’s the human story beyond the icon of Lucille Ball. 

That painting-versus-photograph approach, does it take the pressure off of trying to bring icons like Lucy and Desi to life? 

I hope it does. I also think that there’s no point in telling that story if your purpose is to do an exact replica. That’s just cosplay. It’s tough, because a lot of people have a lot of personal connections to anything surrounding their legacy and they’re going to have to get over it. If you think you’re going to never work again and at the same time maybe your marriage might end in the next 72 hours...those are the things that the story is dealing with more than “did we get the hair right.” The way the internet works is to be like, “Let’s find a thing to scratch and then pick it until it’s a problem.” Sometimes I agree, and sometimes I don’t. 

And this last year, when we were all stuck at home, I think that was even more tempting. You know, something to do just to give the day some shape. 

Sure. What did I do today? Well, I tore some stuff down on the internet for a while, and then I built some other stuff back up. 

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