White Lotus season 3 star Jason Isaacs wants people to stop talking about his character’s full-frontal moment in the show.
Jason, 61, who plays southern swindler Timothy Ratliff this season, was surprised to find people debating whether or not the penis he flashed in episode 5 actually belonged to him or if a prosthetic was used for the scene. However, he was more bothered by what he called a “double standard” on how women and men are treated regarding nude scenes in film.
“A lot of people are debating it. It’s all over the internet,” Jason said during an interview with CBS Mornings on March 14. “And it’s interesting that there’s a double standard for men, but when women are naked, no one would dream of talking to her about her genitalia or her nipples or any of those things.”
When CBS Mornings hosts Gayle King, Tony Dokoupil and Vladimir Duthiers prodded the Harry Potter star and jokingly accused him of dodging the question of whether the appendage was a prosthetic, he replied, “It is a dodge because I don’t think people really want to know how the sausage is made.”
After host Gayle, 70, seemed to successfully shift the topic of discussion away from genitalia, her costar Tony, 44, circled back around to it once again.
“What is your obsession?” Jason asked. “Mike White [the show’s creator] is a brilliant writer. It’s the best series on television for a long time. And what is the obsession with penises? It’s an odd thing.”
Some fans rallied around The OA alum in the comments section of the video, and some felt that the hosts’ questions were “utterly ridiculous and the very definition of cringeworthy.”
Others felt as though Jason was missing the point.
“The reason people don’t talk about female nudity as much isn’t because women face less scrutiny and ogling about their bodies —it’s because female nudity has been so normalized that it’s expected,” one person wrote. “For decades, women’s bodies have been treated as objects for consumption, which is why their nudity doesn’t spark the same conversation. That’s not a privilege — that’s misogyny in action.”
The commenter continued, “For this actor to frame this as women ‘having it easier’ when the very thing he’s complaining about is a direct result of that misogyny is genuinely unbelievable and deeply disappointing. The fact that this even needs explaining is exhausting. Please, start educating yourselves.”
However, some of Jason’s costars had previously revealed that he wore a prosthetic for the full-frontal scene.
“That wasn’t his real penis,” Sam Nivola, who plays Lochlan, the youngest son of Jason’s character, told TV Insider in an interview published on March 11. “He’s like, ‘It’s my fake d–k scene today!’”
Sarah Catherine Hook, who stars as Piper, also confirmed that Jason didn’t truly bare it all in The White Lotus.
“It was a prosthetic,” she told the publication in the joint interview with Sam, 21. “It was really funny. He was very excited to do it. I think he took pride in the prosthetic.”
