Adam DiMarco: ‘I wasn’t prepared for how big The White Lotus would be’

"It puts a murder mystery at the forefront and you get these intersecting sexual storylines." Photo / Viva

“I haven’t spoiled the ending for anyone and I’m not going to make you the first,” jokes Adam DiMarco. Gutting. The 32-year-old actor is speaking over Zoom from Los Angeles, a couple of days before the finale of series two of The White Lotus, HBO’s satirical murder mystery set in a luxury hotel. The programme, which follows the intersecting lives of incredibly rich – and morally dubious – holidaymakers (he plays the well-intentioned but essentially naive Albie di Grasso) has had the TV chattering classes in a vice-like grip since the first notes of the fabulous, house-inflected theme music and it is the most hotly anticipated finale of 2022.

“I wasn’t prepared for how big it would be,” DiMarco says, reflecting on a couple of months that have changed the trajectory of his career. After all, his is a seminal character in a massive TV hit: this season’s viewing figures have grown week on week and each episode is now attracting around 9.5 million viewers, 60 per cent more than season one. “Mike White [the programme’s writer-director] is a genius. He has the internet in a chokehold. He knows the formula to get people buzzing and it’s a great watercooler show. It lends itself well to conversation, especially the ambiguousness of every scene and every character. It has been funny watching the internet obsess over it and try to figure out clues.”

At the start of the first episode we learned that a number of dead bodies have been found in the sea off the beach of a luxury hotel in Sicily, but we don’t know whose bodies they are, or what happened to them. The action then hops back a week, when we meet the guests in the knowledge that some of them, at least, are doomed. It’s not just a whodunnit, but a who-was-it-dun-to?

While the ingenious double mystery structure helps, mostly we are watching because The White Lotus is perhaps the most tautly written, beautifully acted and deliciously ambiguous programme on TV. If the first series, which was set in Hawaii, focused on class, the second has been about sex, and its power to cut across other boundaries – wealth, age, friendship, nationality, class and employment status. In this telling, a luxurious hotel – The White Lotus itself, played ably by the Four Seasons in Taormina, Sicily – is not somewhere to relax but a Petri dish of neurosis. Whatever your problems were before you came, it says, they will be worse by the time you leave.

"It puts a murder mystery at the forefront and you get these intersecting sexual storylines." Photo / Neon

“It’s relatable, [in that] even if you haven’t been on a vacation [like this] you see these rich people in these beautiful settings, so it has that escapism to it,” he says. “Then it puts a murder mystery at the forefront and you get these intersecting sexual storylines. Everyone’s decent-looking, the music’s amazing and it’s a true ensemble. I have to suffer through my stuff, but I get to enjoy watching everyone else’s work as a fan.”

For DiMarco, it is a role that announces him as a big talent. He grew up in Canada, and until now has mainly starred in more young-adult-oriented programmes, namely the Syfy series The Magicians. In The White Lotus, he plays the youngest of three generations of Italian-Americans who have come to Sicily hoping to reconnect with their heritage. His performance stands out, even in an exceptional ensemble. There’s also Jennifer Coolidge as the troubled millionaire Tanya, the only recurring character from series one. And there are stacks of Brits in this series, including Tom Hollander as a sinister middle-aged playboy and Will Sharpe and Theo James as rich college buddies on holiday with their wives. The latter two both play Americans. “I tested a couple of friends and asked them if they knew Will and Theo were British, but they couldn’t tell at all,” says DiMarco.

“I tested a couple of friends and asked them if they knew Will and Theo were British, but they couldn’t tell at all”. Photo / Supplied

At the outset, Albie is a shy Stanford graduate, rich and handsome but diffident, perhaps to a fault: the kind of guy who asks permission before he kisses Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), a fellow tourist he takes a shine to. Six hours of TV later, however, jilted by Portia, Albie has taken up with Lucia (the impeccably named Simona Tabasco), a fiery local sex worker. He has also confronted his father and grandfather about their irrepressible lechery. Albie seems capable of much more, perhaps even murder.

DiMarco’s performance is all the more impressive when you consider that his father is played by Michael Imperioli, best known as Christopher Moltisanti in The Sopranos, and his grandfather Bert by F Murray Abraham, who won an Oscar in 1984 for playing Salieri in Amadeus. How was it for him to be cast opposite two heavyweights?

“I mainly saw myself as support for these two amazing actors. But then because it’s an ensemble, everyone’s kind of a support." Photo / Supplied

“It was confidence-inspiring, and also anxiety-inducing at first,” he says. “I mainly saw myself as support for these two amazing actors. But then because it’s an ensemble, everyone’s kind of a support. Albie’s just a [regular] guy so I tried to do way less than I normally do when I play characters. I was like, ‘I hope this is still interesting because it feels like I’m not doing anything’.”

He can relax. Over the course of the series, Albie has slowly asserted himself, including in a memorable scene at one of the shooting locations for The Godfather, where he dresses down his father and grandfather for obsessing over that film, which celebrates a toxic vision of masculinity. DiMarco hadn’t seen The Godfather before shooting The White Lotus. “Yeah, if anyone out there hasn’t seen it, it’s worth a look,” he deadpans.

Albie becomes smitten with Lucia (the impeccably named Simona Tabasco), a fiery local sex worker. Photo / Neon

Does he feel that the tide on toxic masculinity is turning in real life? “There’s definitely been a shift in what I would consider intimacy or communication or vulnerability,” he says. “I was at a poker night the other night with a bunch of men of different ages, and the ‘locker-room talk’ was not what you’d have thought. At one point someone said, ‘Did you know they’ve lowered the age at which you should get your prostate checked? We could all go together...’”

As the son of Italian parents, DiMarco found the setting for this series of White Lotus resonated with him. During the shoot, while other members of the cast went off for weekends in Paris or London, he would stay in Sicily.

“I feel a connection to the ancestral land,” he says. “I get it. I get why Bert is wanting to go back in his old age. When I got my Italian passport and citizenship [in Canada], there was this really old man at the consulate trying to reason with them at the window. They weren’t having it. At one point he was pleading, saying, ‘I just want to die there.’ I get that as well. That’s a big theme of series two: sex and death. Italy is a beautiful place to die.”

The White Lotus was filmed at the glorious San Domenico Palace, Taormina, a Four Seasons Hotel in Sicily. Photo / Supplied

While Albie and Adam might share Italian heritage and a thoughtfulness around masculinity, the actor is keen to stress they are not one and the same. “I don’t have sex with my socks on,” he jokes, adding that his life is “whatever the opposite of White Lotus is. I have been rewatching Harry Potter. I go out for dinner.” He is heading back to Vancouver for Christmas. After that, he’ll be back in LA, ready to seize the opportunities The White Lotus has opened up for him. He says he’s “reading scripts” – a coy deflection, perhaps, for some large upcoming projects.

Before that, there’s the little matter of a murderous finale. When we speak, the cast hasn’t seen the finished product either. DiMarco is hoping to arrange a viewing party with some of his co-stars, who became friends during the course of filming. Series three is already in the works, with the internet in feverish discussion about which actors ought to be in it. Who would DiMarco like to see put through the ringer of a luxury holiday?

“Let’s just bring the same cast back,” he says, more in hope than expectation. “And go to, like, Japan.”