‘The White Lotus’ actors on Laurie’s dinner fight with Jaclyn and Kate

“They call us ‘The Ladies,’ ” Leslie Bibb says proudly assessing the name given to the video call (TWL Three Ladies) we’re on.

“That’s our text thread — The Ladies,” adds Carrie Coon, her co-star on “The White Lotus.”

It’s a few days before the penultimate episode of Season 3 drops, and Bibb, Coon and Michelle Monaghan are convening virtually to discuss their fascinating and disturbingly accurate depiction of female friendship. Their characters — Jaclyn (Monaghan), an actor newly married to a younger man; Laurie (Coon), a single mom and corporate lawyer; and Kate (Bibb), a wealthy Independent voter from Austin — are longtime friends on a girls trip in Thailand that has all the tension and suspense of a horror movie produced by Bravo. Unlike others on the show, these blonde besties are not facing financial ruin, nor are they troubled souls seeking to avenge their father’s death, but their A-plus passive aggression and impeccable gossiping has been just as compelling to watch. Who cares about a corpse when you’ve got friends wondering if you’ve sandblasted your face?

To help make that dynamic believable, Bibb said the trio began a text thread after they were cast as a way to brainstorm the characters’ shared history: “We were like, ‘OK, how old were we [when we] met?’ I think we decided on 7, 8,” she says. “Where are we from? I think we picked Ohio, Midwest. Then we just started sending photos of ourselves when we were kids. And it was really nice to have that because you can just look at it and suddenly you’re like, ‘Oh, I do know this person.’ ”

“It was incredibly helpful,” Monaghan says. “It’s exciting to collaborate with them and starting that [thread] and sharing some stories about those times in our lives really just got the ball rolling. We’re still sharing photos of our respective families. We’re keeping the thread alive. We’re bonded.”

And it seems to have paid off onscreen because they are the embodiment of the TikTok meme “honestly, like, I love her, but she’s kind of a problem.”

This week’s episode brings the ladies simmering tension to a head. With Laurie still peeved about Jaclyn’s sleepover with Valentin, the hotel worker the actor had been encouraging Laurie to pursue, the women’s dinner turns into a sharing circle of underhanded observations about each other. It ultimately leads to Laurie venturing off to the Muay Thai fight with Valentin and his friends, and she later hooks up with one of them, which results in the world’s most awkward pillow talk.

The Times spoke with the actors to discuss the trio’s blow up in this week’s episode, shooting in Thailand and connecting over laundry. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.

The three of you have been memed online for weeks. What’s it like to reach meme status? Leslie, has your tight smile made the rounds in your group chats?

Bibb: Oh my gosh, it’s just funny. I think I’m more impressed that our storyline has struck such a chord with everybody. I feel like you guys will also agree, it’s not as dramatic, per se, as the other storylines. I think we did our job very well, the three of us, and the fact that it seems to be resonating with everyone is really, really cool. Talking about beans and pickleball doesn’t feel like it’s as high drama as lorazepam.

This week’s episode finds the small-scale warfare and passive aggressiveness between the trio coming to a head. What do you remember about filming the dinner table scene?

Monaghan: It really comes to a crescendo at this moment. Laurie is basically fed up. She’s fed up with the ladies, specifically Jaclyn. She feels really betrayed by Jaclyn’s actions and she’s going to let her have it. At this point, I don’t think Jaclyn did something that she felt was manipulative or malicious. I think Jaclyn made a really impulsive decision that was, in her mind, fleeting and was fulfilling something in her that felt like a natural reaction to feeling ignored. Maybe back home, she’s got some issues. And as a result of having that uproar with the ladies earlier that afternoon at the pool, she’s really got her guard up. When Laurie feels compelled to say her piece, I think Jaclyn defends herself and attacks right back and we see the claws come out.

I love the idea that these ladies know each other so well — their respective tendencies and the patterns — that each one can be so nimble and so deft at pivoting an accusation or deflecting the conversation in their favor. None of the ladies, unfortunately, want to accept responsibility for any of their actions; instead, they’re more inclined to hurt each other in this moment than trying to connect and understand each other’s insecurities or issues. All of a sudden, you just feel this hurricane of anxiety throughout the scene. They know all the buttons to push.

Laurie ventures off on her own, and has her rendezvous-gone-bad with Aleksei, Valentin’s friend. Carrie, I imagine you weren’t surprised by that development, but what did that reveal to you about Laurie?

Coon: I love that Yvonne Villarreal Mike [White] has put Laurie in a position where she has to hit a bottom. I love the journey she gets to go on. There’s something really thrilling about it. She finally gets laid. You can imagine a world where she gets to go back to her friends and say, “I did it” and “I feel attractive again!” But that’s not what happens because it’s ultimately humiliating … in fact, so humiliating that she can barely bring herself to reckon with just how awful it feels to have it be revealed the reasons why. And she’s on the outs with her friends. But what I love about that moment is that, though she makes those accusations at the table, Laurie is someone who refuses to take responsibility for her part, and she is not self-reflective, and this moment in the show forces upon her a real true reckoning with her own responsibility for those choices.

Michelle, do you think Valentin made that same request of Jaclyn? Is this a scheme?

Monaghan: Do I think that Valentin made a request for $10,000? No, I think he got all his money’s worth in the moment.

Bibb: Savage. As Jaclyn would only say.

Something that is so funny is how people can’t seem to remember the names of these women. We just call them “the trio” or some on the internet call them the white ladies or white frenemies. Mike White calls you the blonde blob.

Bibb: I find it fascinating that exactly what Mike wanted, Mike got. He wanted [with] these three women, [that] you couldn’t tell them apart. They were all going to be blonde. There were times I would be on set and Carrie and I have a similar enough haircut and the same thing started to happen on set. Even though Michelle’s hair was longer, everybody just sort of mushed us together in this blob of the sea. I really feel very lucky to have Carrie and Michelle as scene partners. We got on well and there’s chemistry and we were all committed.

Coon: Leslie, was [Episode 7] that cicada-frog-boat-elephant night?

Bibb: Yes!

Monaghan: An elephant in the background.

Bibb: And that f—ing party boat.

Coon: On Leslie’s coverage that night, it was one biblical event after another. It was like an hour and a half of trying to get Leslie’s side of that and she just had to stay focused while there were frogs, cicadas and a party boat—

Bibb: I can’t watch it.

Coon: I haven’t seen it yet either.

Bibb: We were doing that dinner table scene; it was long and it was at night. We did Carrie’s and Michelle’s coverage first. We get to mine and there was a pickleball monologue. We did that before lunch, we came back from lunch and the cicadas — it was like Jesus had just opened the Bible and said, “Let it happen.” [A crew member] had a decimal checker and he’s like, “Wow, it’s 73 decibels.” It was crazy.

Coon: It felt like forever because of the Doppler effect. It was like 25 minutes of the party boat.

Monaghan: We were like, “We’re here for you. We’re gonna get it.”

Coon: It took an hour.

Bibb: I think I went to my room and I cried because I was like, “It’s such a good monologue. I have so much…” But to have both of these women sitting there being like, “You got this.”

Coon: You were amazing.

[Reporter’s note: The monologue did not make the final cut.]

There are times when it feels like I’m watching a nature documentary about female friendship. It can be volatile, it can be incredibly beautiful, but it’s especially complex in groups of three or more. How has the dynamic in the show reflected that for you? Is there a moment that felt like you were seeing yourself in the mirror?

Monaghan: What you bring up a really great point about the mirroring. That’s Mike’s intention. It may also be why a lot of the audience out there cannot remember our character names because what he does so brilliantly is reflect these women onto our respective lives. I see myself in Jaclyn. I see myself in Laurie. I see myself in Kate. The idea that one is always sort of the victim, the perpetrator, the peacekeeper. I just turned 49 — I have been all of those women in my lifetime. At different stages of our lives, we’ve encountered these women, or we’ve been these women, we’ve perpetuated this dynamic, or we’ve also endured this dynamic. I think that’s why it’s really resonating with with women specifically out there.

Something that came up in my conversations with friends about the trio is our earliest memories of experiencing this dynamic, which, for me, was as a 5–year–old, when I moved into a new neighborhood and there were two girls across the street. They would talk badly about the other to me. Has it provoked any conversations among your friend groups?

Coon: It’s funny you brought that up. My sister and I grew up in a rural area, so there were no other kids in our neighborhood. But there was one other girl who was our best friend. We had a shared best friend — we were always triangulating. Every single day.

Bibb: Sister stuff too — that’s already tricky. Then you add the best friend that you have to share — it’s a f— nightmare. Something that I think is pretty interesting, too, is the gossiping part of it. It almost feels like it’s become a currency with which people trade. And it’s somehow always under the guise of caring because I think there’s something that’s happened where people … I don’t know if they don’t know how to look at themselves, so they push it out and it’s their way of somehow connecting. I don’t think these three women are like, “Oh, I’m gonna destroy Jaclyn or Laurie.” It always starts as this desire to connect to Jaclyn or to connect to Laurie and to share something and to say, “I see you. I feel you.” It’s such a strange tether. But I was at dinner the other night, I heard some men talking s— about each other. It’s universal. If you turn on Bravo, it’s every way that those women [behave], it’s what they’re taught to do. It sells.

Coon: It’s meaningful that Mike set this season in Thailand, in a Buddhist country, because, of course, if you look at the tenets of Buddhism, one of the great sufferings is comparing mind. And comparing mind is whether you are elevating yourself above someone or putting yourself below them. There is pain for you and there is suffering you’re inflicting on other people by doing that. The only way to prevent that kind of suffering is to stop the comparing mind, which is very hard to do unless you completely circumvent your identity. Mike is very intentionally setting this female dynamic in this season about spirituality and Buddhism.

Mike’s a reality TV buff. Bravo personalities have inspired certain aspects of characters this season. Leslie, I know you’ve said you drew inspiration from “Real Housewives” —

Bibb: Can I just tell you something? That was a little bit of a lie.

Coon: You were watching it one morning, though.

Bibb: I mean, I do watch it. I always watch that [stuff] because I feel like you’re watching women and you play these women and something’s gonna seep in, but it also feels mindless; it felt like a tether to home, in a way. But I would not say I based anything of Kate in this. I said it and I was like, “Why are you lying?” I didn’t know what to say. Also, I feel like if you talk about your process as an actor, you just sound like an a—.

I think it’s interesting that we watch those shows — I can see someone else’s life and I don’t have to look at my own. But I also feel like we, in watching those shows, somehow become active participants in the dynamic. I did “Watch What Happens Live” and [my hair person and stylist’s assistant] were there and Garcelle [Beauvais of “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills”] was there and we were all like, “Could you believe this?” And “Sutton that …” And we became the f— ladies. We were triangulating. [With Kate,] she needs these friendships to last. They’re very important to her. They are not going to end this weekend not friends. I felt like that. I don’t know about the other girls.

What keeps them friends that we don’t see?

Monaghan: I think, oftentimes, these relationships go through all different stages of lives — specific to these three, they’ve all gone off and pursued very, very different life choices and careers and family types and, yet, the one thing that connects them is their shared history. But we discover, as the series progresses, that we all have very different versions of what that shared history is and how we remember it.

Your characters room together in the show, but how closely did you stick together while making it?

Coon: The ladies — we kicked off the whole season. We were shot out of the canon, with the learning curve of shooting in Thailand. It was very galvanizing for us to have to go through that together. It felt like a show about three women for two weeks.

Bibb: I like that show!

Coon: I was living with Leslie at the Four Seasons, and Michelle and Parker were next door, so we were just thrust into being roommates. The circumstances changed — we moved around 12 times, so there were times we were living closer together and other times we were further apart. We got to know the locations. We were there for six months. We were building lives. You’d settle in to your routine. We didn’t know each other before this, so our friendship unfolded over the course of that six months, while we were playing these old friends, and again, in this very galvanizing experience, in this very challenging environment. Beautiful? Yes. But very challenging shooting circumstances. That was just inevitably a bonding experience for everybody involved.

Bibb: And laundry. Carrie and I really met on our love of laundry.

Coon: We had our buckets.

Bibb: I literally went home and bought the identical bucket that Carrie had.

Coon: We also had our swim aerobics classes. We had our beach swims.

Monaghan: That was everything. Our greatest swim instructor ever, Leslie Bibb.

Bibb: As a cast, I think everyone really bonded because you’re together — you’re at breakfast and at lunch.

Coon: Patrick Schwarzenegger and both of his breakfasts.

Bibb: He loves breakfast.

Coon: He would spend hours at breakfast. Tell Patrick that breakfast is included in anything and he’ll stay there for hours. And then take all the protein bars home for the gym.

Before I let you ladies go, I just have one quick question: Has anyone tried “The White Lotus” coffee creamer? I cannot find it.

Monaghan: What? What is it?

Bibb: Have you guys seen this? Yeah, from Coffee-Mate, right?

Coon: Everyone’s getting in on the branding!

Bibb: I haven’t, but I saw it.

Coon: Is it a special flavor?

Bibb: Did you see the chocolate that they collabed with? And that’s mango sticky rice [flavored]. So, is the coffee creamer like a mango sticky rice?

Monaghan: Wait, what?

Bibb: Yes, M!

Monaghan: Oh, I need that.