On Sunday nights, Patrick Schwarzenegger has dinner with his family. Then they all gather together to watch The White Lotus. “Every time we would watch, my family would just be yapping at me: ‘Why aren’t you in this show? Why didn’t you audition for this show? You need to talk to someone to get you on this show,’” Schwarzenegger says.
When he was finally asked to audition for the third season of Mike White’s hit HBO series, he decided not to tell his family in fear of getting their hopes up. Once he had landed the part, though, he revealed the good news at another family dinner. “They all started crying,” he says. “It was a really great moment for me.”
Schwarzenegger got to bring the whole crew—including his fiancée, Abby Champion; his father, Arnold Schwarzenegger; his mother, Maria Shriver; his sisters, Christina and Katherine; and his brother-in-law, Chris Pratt—to the third season’s world premiere in Los Angeles. There, they finally got to see him step into the world of The White Lotus as Saxon Ratliff, son of a rich businessman (Jason Isaacs) who is vacationing with his family at a luxury resort in Thailand.
In the first episode, which debuted on HBO Sunday, Schwarzenegger’s Saxon stands out among a very crowded ensemble of characters—both for his alpha male bravado, and for the uncomfortable things he says and does around his sister Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) and brother Lochlan (Sam Nivola). When they’re discussing sleeping arrangements, Saxon says that Lochlan should stay with him because “brothers and sisters don’t sleep together after they have full-blown…you know… genitals.” He’s constantly talking about sex (“Dude, those long plane rides make me so fucking horny”). As the episode wraps up, he has a heart-to-heart with his brother where he says that their sister is “pretty hot, but I don’t think she’s ever been laid before” before telling Lochlan that he’s going to watch porn in their bathroom. Saxon then struts across the room completely naked, with Lochlan’s gaze lingering a little too long.
Clearly, Saxon is driven by his sexuality and unafraid to say anything that comes to his mind. But Schwarzenegger plays this swaggering guy with a playfulness and authenticity that makes even his most outlandish actions and words seem believable. “I think that’s what Mike does so well: As the viewer, you really want to think and be convinced that any person in the show is willing and capable of doing anything,” the actor says.
Schwarzenegger, whose credits include 2022’s The Staircase and 2024’s American Sports Story, spoke to Vanity Fair about how he landed a role on his dream show, daddy issues, and what he makes of the premiere’s creepy final scene.
Vanity Fair: How much did you know about the character when you were auditioning?
Patrick Schwarzenegger: I knew nothing, really. I knew a one-sentence logline. The show was called something else, “Secret Garden” or something like that. You get the audition sides with one sentence about the character. I think Mike does that in a very purposeful way. He wants to see how you interpret the role with the little information he gives you.
I just kind of took a swing. And I remember my brother-in-law Chris [Pratt] said that the casting director knows within the first whatever seconds if you’re someone that works for the role or not, and make the first five seconds of the audition tape something unique and different. And so I knew this character was going to be this kind of douchey, flirty finance guy that was a despicable human—but also someone that you wanted to root for, and thought was funny in a weird way. And so the first couple seconds of the audition tape, I just was like, for lack of a better word, eye-fucking, or kind of checking out the camera, and then approaching it as if the camera was a girl. And they thought that was really funny and weird and cool.
