Everyone Wants to Know If That White Lotus Poop Was Real

May 2024 · 4 minute read

We could probably talk for a few hours about everything that was at play in The White Lotus, from the darkly satirical look at the wealthy and out-of-touch vacationers staying at the titular Hawaiian resort (and the working people putting up with their needs and requests just to make a living), to the overarching mystery of someone's demise that remains the gorilla in the room throughout the show's six hour-long episodes. But instead of getting into all that, we're instead going to hone in on a far more grisly mystery of the finale: did Murray Bartlett (who played doomed resort manager Armond) really poop in Shane Patton's (Jake Lacy) suitcase?

Let's roll it back just a little bit. When Armond learned he was about to be fired from his post as manager of The White Lotus, he led a drug-fueled final dinner service—it was almost like a victory lap. And what's a victory lap without shitting on your adversaries? Armond may have had this thought and took the "shitting" part a bit too literally, as he entered the much-discussed Pineapple Suite, where Shane and Rachel (Alexandra Daddario) had been staying, and took a big, graphic, shit right in Shane's suitcase. Shane had been a thorn in his side all week long, and now he was getting fired because of it. For Armond, this was the only way.

Except this moment of fecal catharsis would have to be Armond's final moment of any catharsis. Within a few moments, Shane was back in the room. He discovered the turd in his luggage, but not long after a freakout he heard Armond in the room. He grabbed the Pineapple Suite's Pineapple Knife, and, inspecting the room, found Armond and impulsively stabbed him in the chest. Armond bled out in the Pineapple Suite's bathtub, not even wiping his ass following his final purposeful dump.

We can talk a lot about the ending—Lacy himself does right here—and we can also speculate on what could possibly be in store for The White Lotus Season 2. But let's be real—we want to know a little more about how that whole poop-in-a-suitcase thing came to be. So, let's just get into that, shall we?

I mean, you couldn't believe someone would actually do that on a film set, right? Scenes don't actually happen in real-time—every single shot you see in a movie or a TV show is typically performed over and over and over again, so that the editing team has options in post-production. Imagine Bartlett needing to poop in a suitcase over and over and over again? Not to mention the fact that would be incredibly unsanitary and unsettling for everyone involved with the production.

But still, weirder things have happened, we suppose. Esquire asked Bartlett about the poop heard around the world in a post-mortem Lotus interview, and while he played a bit coy ("I can't break the magic," he said), he basically confirmed that what we saw was...a bit of good old fashioned Hollywood Flash. Or whatever "Hollywood Flash" substitute phrase we'd use to describe making it look very realistically like a very intoxicated man is taking a shit in a suitcase.

Here's his full answer:

[quote] All I can say is that when I saw it, I was shocked. I did not expect that it was going to be so explicit and look so real. I think it's so brilliant in terms of the shock value. It was very methodically done, and very respectfully done, for me, which was really great. Those scenes are always weird to do and something like that, obviously it's just going to be awkward. There's no way around it. Who's going to be comfortable taking a shit in a suitcase with your pants around your ankles? All I can say is I give great props to the props department. They did an amazing job with it. Maybe talk to the make-up department. They can walk you through it a bit more.

It sounds like poop was...a prop? We can buy that. When we got our look at the dormant turd sitting on top of Shane's clothing, it certainly looked real, so credit for that. You could smell that thing through your screen.

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