Interview: Will Sharpe (‘The White Lotus’) on Getting Into Ethan’s Head Space, Working with Mike White, and How He’d Fare on ‘Survivor’

Will Sharpe is probably one of the most under the radar multi-hyphenates working today. As an actor, writer, director and producer in shorts, television, theater and feature films, Sharpe hasn’t simply found a single niche but mastered them all.

Before entering Mike White’s world of The White Lotus, Sharpe, who was born London, raised in Tokyo and moved to back to England when he was 8-years-old, began one of his career paths as a writer for Never Mind the Buzzcocks and continuing through British television with shows like Black Pond and Flowers, the latter of which starred Olivia Colman. He would return to directing the Oscar-winning actress in 2021’s Landscapers. Also in 2021, his feature film directorial debut The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, starring Benedict Cumberbatch (as the titular Wain), Claire Foy, Andrea Riseborough and Toby Jones premiered at the 48th Telluride Film Festival and was nominated for four British Independent Film Awards (BIFA).

He found even bigger awards success, winning a BAFTA TV Award in Supporting Actor for Giri/Haji (among his five BAFTA TV nominations) and was nominated for a BAFTA Film Award in Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer for Black Pond. Add a Screen Actors Guild Award (SAG) win for his season of The White Lotus and Sharpe is no stranger to accolades.

In The White Lotus, Sharpe plays Ethan Spiller, a newly wealthy tech entrepreneur married to Harper (played by Aubrey Plaza) and on a couples vacation with married friends Cameron (Theo James) and Daphne (Meghann Fahey), where friends become rivals, secrets are revealed and relationships are irrevocably changed.

I talked with Sharpe about playing Ethan, creating back stories with Mike White, what surprised him the most about working Aubrey Plaza and more.

Will Sharpe: Hi.

Erik Anderson: Hello.

WS: Hello. Oh, hi. There you are. How are you doing?

EA: Fantastic. How are you, Will?

WS: Yeah, good. Thank you. Thanks for your time.

EA: Absolutely. You’re over in England right now?

WS: I’m in London, yeah, that’s right.

EA: I’m in the Bay Area.

WS: Oh, nice.

EA: Thanks for being here as well.

WS: Of course. Pleasure.

EA: As a multi-hyphenate writer, director, actor, do you have an order? How do you refer to yourself when you were to introduce yourself to someone?

WS: (laughs) I guess I wouldn’t use any of those to introduce myself, but I don’t know. I feel they’re obviously related disciplines and I think they all feed one another. I think part of me, I learned, kind of came up through comedy and making microbudget films, short films, then a couple of features. So, I guess a part of me still feels like filmmaking, whatever your role is within it, is sort of a bunch of people with a camera trying to make something. I think whatever the scale of the project, there’s a part of me that still feels like I’m standing in that field, muddling through.

EA: Do you have different needs or parameters depending on what aspect you’re a part of a project?

WS: Different responsibilities, I guess. I don’t know. Probably different needs, but I’ve never analyzed it in that way, to be honest. Yeah.

EA: What intrigued you about Ethan? What was different about him than other characters that you played?

WS: Ethan, I guess what was immediately attractive about him was his journey and how different he is at the end of the series compared to how we meet him and the sort of process of getting him to that place. That was immediately interesting for me. Also, I guess playing a character who is morally quite gray and ambiguous, you sort of meet him and maybe suspect he’s just kind of like an ordinary, nice guy, harmless guy, but actually he starts to behave in quite a problematic way, as do all the men in the series. But some of the characters I think present immediately as toxic in some way. Whereas with Ethan, it sort of creeps up on you perhaps. But I think his heart ultimately is in the right place, and he is trying to be good. He just doesn’t always make the right choices, and he doesn’t always put other people’s feelings first.

I guess particularly as an Asian American character, that was exciting to me to play somebody who was neither sickly sweet, nor a kind of complete cartoonish villain. But actually, maybe more than anything, it was how mysterious he was and sort of enigmatic and hard to pin down. I remember early on talking to the costume designer, for example, and her saying, “Do you know what? Of all the characters, I’m still trying to figure Ethan out.” In my early conversations with Mike sort of trying to figure out, does this character need… Are you looking for some corners in the playing of him? And it seemed like he just wanted Ethan to be this sort of question mark, a sort of hologram until he comes into focus, and you start to see who he really is. That was a challenge, I think, for sure. But it was also interesting to try and play.

EA: That’s a good segue. I was really curious about, since we, parts of Ethan’s past, both with Cameron and with Harper. Did you work together and with Mike to create much of a backstory, or how did that unfold with each of you?

WS: I think Mike, we talked a little bit at the beginning about Ethan and Harper’s marriage and that it sort of, probably they’d been together for at least seven years. I know for Mike, a big part of it was that he wanted to tell the story of a relationship that simply had been going on for too long. If either of us tried to find some reason for the marriage going awry, like some diagnosable thing, he would often say that he just wanted it to be that there was a kind of atrophy that had come with the time that they’d spent together. So, there was, and Aubrey and I would talk a little bit as well about, I guess trying to make sure we were on the same page about their hinterlands, where they came from. I think we made some arbitrary choices about how they met that maybe they’d met at somebody else’s wedding, things like that.

I guess wanting it to be that this was a couple who did love each other ultimately, so that there were some stakes to the story. And it wasn’t simply that they were sort of wrong for each other, I guess. Then with Theo, I think… I remember we got the same flight over at the very beginning, and I remember us having some conversations about how fucked up their friendship is. Again, I suppose how much to play, how much to try to offset that toxicity versus lean into it, I guess. And both cases, I felt like Mike really wanted us to go… Well, first of all, never to play out for laughs really, and to play honestly and seriously. As a result of that, I felt like the dynamics would just get tenser and tenser and sort of dysfunctional and at times painful as well.

EA: The season has a lot to say about masculinity and both you and Theo are British playing very archetype American guy roles that are complimentary. And this script keeps that pretty morally gray, which is kind of fascinating.

WS: There’s this sort of weird sense of competitiveness that seems to come with that kind of world. And even with Ethan who is pretending, I think, not to have that in him, you realize that maybe he does in the end.

EA: Maybe it’s just me, but there is an undercurrent of homoeroticism and sexual chemistry between Ethan and Cameron that I feel is woven through. And I feel like that’s very Mike White to do that.

WS: Yeah. I guess it’s part of the whole guessing game of where this season is heading. I think maybe also because the instinct when you’re watching the show, I think is to try and work out what’s wrong. Maybe it’s just a human instinct to try and work out what’s wrong in the friendships, in the marriages, whatever, in these people, just existentially in themselves. And it sort of offers a possible answer on the quiz sheets. That was interesting to see and to be in. There’s so many different interpretations of all of it, I think.

EA: I almost feel like we could have an entire conversation just about Aubrey Plaza. We’ve had a few conversations with her, and she’s fascinating. What about working with her surprised you the most?

WS: I think what surprised me about working with her is similar to what surprised me about working on the show in that I think she’s obviously very funny and has a dry sense of humor, which works for me, but also took it very seriously and wanted to do a good job and for it to feel honest and excavatory in some way, I suppose. I think my whole experience with The White Lotus was that… My first read of it maybe was, I found it pretty funny. I found it comical, the farcical nature of it, and the way these couples interact. I essentially found it to be mainly comical.

But then as we got into it and realizing more and more that we would not be playing these scenes ourselves for laughs, even if they are funny because of the situation. That would give rise again to these tensions and to the sort of seriousness of the story, in a way, in the end. And there are some scenes between Ethan and Harper that are pretty sad, I can’t really think of any other way of putting it and needed us to be vulnerable in that room with each other. I think it was probably that she was more serious in a good way than I expected. And so was the experience of making the show.

EA: Your dynamic together is fantastic. It’s one of the great selling points of the season.

WS: Oh, thank you. Yeah. I guess the instinct sometimes at the beginning was to try and bring some kind of tenderness or levity or something to offset, like I said earlier, the feeling of dysfunction, but I really feel like Mike wanted that relationship in particular to feel like agony. Sometimes, in some of the scenes, I really had to get into Ethan’s head space, which anyway, I think was not a very comfortable place to be. I guess, because partly he’s arguably turning into something that he doesn’t want to be. And there’s one way of looking at the series where he is being slowly corrupted by Cameron and Daphne.

But he’s also often doing things that I know are, as a reader, I know it’s the wrong thing for him to do, but I need to get into the heart of somebody who in that moment is so terrified or paralyzed or unthinking that he honestly thinks he’s doing the right thing when he is doing something really dishonest or really unhelpful. I’m thinking in particular of that scene where Harper is sort of saying, “Do you want me?” I think is the line. And his response is, “I love you.” And obviously, when you are reading it, you’re like, don’t say that Ethan, but somehow have to find a way to do it where you believe that he thinks he’s doing the right thing.

EA: Yeah. I think anyone that’s ever been in a relationship, whether it’s a seven-year itch or a 20 year has had that moment, and you kind of wonder, are you going to give the sympathetic lie answer or the honest answer.

WS: Right, yeah.

EA: That moment has, I think, more honesty than most people are willing to truly offer.

WS: Yeah, it’s interesting because they start off by saying, “Oh, we’re really honest with each other,” but they’re not really being in the beginning, but in the end, they do get there for better or worse, and it’s quite painful when they do.

EA: It’s really something. Even though this is, I guess now three years ago that you, this feels like a lifetime ago. Between shooting, were you able to take any day trips or night trips around the city, and what was the best thing you saw or ate?

WS: The best thing I saw or ate. I will say that the groceries, just the fruit and vegetables are different there and taste better. I remember coming back to London and being like, this is not tomato. What is this? And I think in a… I love the ocean, so being near the ocean was really nice. And a surreal part of being in Taormina, which was where we were camped for most of it, was the fact that Mount Etna is just so close and looms so large over the city. It really does give that town a strange feeling. It’s incredibly beautiful, but there’s also a sort of darkness there and a kind of tension, which I think is felt, hopefully, in the show a little bit as well. Yeah.

EA: Yeah, for sure. One of my favorite performances that you’ve ever given outside of Ethan is Rodney in Giri/Haji.

WS: Oh, yeah.

EA: I absolutely love Rodney. I love that performance.

WS: Thank you.

EA: How do you think Rodney would navigate in The White Lotus universe?

WS: Oh my God. He’d just probably take all the drugs in spite of himself and get himself, he’d somehow ends up in the most trouble of anyone I suspect, and then find a way to be rescued by Kelly Macdonald or something.

EA: Or like by an Italian fisherman or something.

WS: Yeah. It’s interesting though. Yeah, because with Ethan… With Rodney, I suppose in the past I’ve often played more obviously character parts, whereas Ethan in the end is that, and obviously I was doing an accent, which was different for myself, but actually the colors of him are quite subtle. That was a really interesting exercise to, I guess, play someone who initially, on the surface of it, presents as quite normal, even though I think he does have things about him that are unusual too, I think.

I guess one of the main things that I carried through, it was this thing that towards the very beginning, Mike did say to me that he wanted it to be an option, that the audience wonders if Ethan is going to kill someone at some point. And so, along with that kind of specific demeanor and the quietness of him, there needed to be enough darkness that you might believe that it would go there, and trying to marry that with the reality of what was going on, which is that he’s terrified that his relationship is falling apart, I guess, and is worried about who he’s turning into. So yeah, it was interesting.

EA: So, Jennifer Coolidge returned for season two and Natasha Rothwell’s coming back for season three. Would you come back as Ethan for a future season?

WS: Sure, yeah. If I was asked, I’d probably get some preemptive therapy. Safeguard myself, but yeah, no, for sure. Yeah.

EA: And then in both seasons of the show, Mike has cast former Survivor castmates on the show. If you watch Survivor, it’s always a fun little Easter egg. How do you think you would fare on Survivor?

WS: It’s a good question. I’ve never seen the show. I know Mike obviously famously took part. I don’t know. I like to think I’d do okay, but am I right in thinking that it’s as much about how you interact with people, it’s as much about the social aspect as it is the actual physical survival? Oh God, that’s sort of ringing some dim bell that, like Mike once talked about the playing of the game in Survivor and how sometimes the quiet ones get further, or something is ringing some bell. But I don’t know. Yeah, I definitely like to… I’d sort of rather be a dark horse than a kind of peacock, I guess, if that’s not a weird pair of animals to bring into the conversation.

EA: That is a perfect analogy of how to succeed on Survivor. It’s funny because you can see and feel the threads of Mike’s experience on that in The White Lotus, because there are early alliances, which then reveal information and create different ones as the show goes on. So, it’s quite fascinating.

WS: I feel like there’s a thesis to be written.

EA: I think so. I think I must be in the creation of it because it’s kind of bubbling right now.

WS: Yeah.

EA: What can you say about your next feature, Crying in H Mart? I know a lot of people, myself included, are really excited.

WS: Not a huge amount yet. Other than that I’m very excited about it, and obviously we’re starting to assemble a team in front of and behind the camera, which is also exciting. We should be shooting this summer, but I don’t have any, I don’t know if there’s anything specific I can share at this point. It’s obviously a very personal story to Michelle who wrote the book and the script. And so, I definitely feel the pressure of honoring that, the truth of that, and finding a way to tell the story in an honest way that also feels free and off itself. But yeah, I think it’s probably a bit early for me to go into it much more than that.

EA: Well, I think if your past work is any clue, it’s going to be pretty special.

WS: Oh, thank you. I appreciate that.

EA: Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

WS: Thank you. It was fun to talk. All the best.

EA: Have a good day.

WS: Good luck with your thesis.

EA: Ha, thank you.

Will Sharpe is Emmy-eligible in the category of Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for The White Lotus.

Photo: Fabio Lovino/HBO