SPOILER ALERT: This post contains details from the Season 3 finale of HBO‘s The White Lotus.

It turns out that drinking a pina colada or smoothie from the fruit of the suicide tree isn’t a great idea, after all.

Jason Isaacs’ Timothy Ratliff had a pretty eventful hour and a half in the season three finale of The White Lotus. When he wasn’t making suicide cocktails or holding his half-dead son by the side of a pool, Ratliff found some sort of redemption or happiness.

Isaacs tells Deadline that his character finally realized that his visit to the monastery allowed him to realize his “love is greater than his fear” and that he doesn’t need to kill his family to protect them from the shady business that he was getting up to. “He has the biggest spiritual journey of anyone, not just in the show, but in anything Mike’s ever written, The irony being, he’s the man who was least seeking that,” he said.

Isaacs, fresh from a cast screening of the finale last night, also reveals what he thought of his fellow cast’s endings as well as how he has dealt with some of the sillier discourse around the show, from Duke University complaining about his clothing to his thoughts on full-frontal nudity and a daft suggestion about Meryl Streep reprising his Harry Potter role for the upcoming TV series.

Having previously described his experience on The White Lotus as a “cross between summer camp and Lord of the Flies but in a gilded cage”, Isaacs, who has also starred in series such as The OA and Star Trek: Discovery as well as Armando Ianucci’s The Death of Stalin, is seemingly salved by having spent much of the last twelve months in Mike White’s orbit.

DEADLINE: How are you feeling after watching the finale?

JASON ISAACS: We watched it all together last night, Mike wouldn’t show it to anybody beforehand. It was a very strange night for all of us because not only were we watching the show, which we’re all fans of, although we’re in it, we’re also essentially saying goodbye and getting some closure on what’s been a year and a half long adventure. We were terribly emotional. Everybody was a little bit like at the end of summer camp, although a bit too grown up for this to be true. We were all crying and holding each other, wondering whether it was the emotion of the moment or whether it was the being moved by the story lines. We were all a little bit shaky afterwards, and even at the end of the night when we said goodbye to each other.

DEADLINE: I’m sure that doesn’t happen on all shows you’ve been part of.

ISAACS: I’ve never been involved in anything like it. I think part of the reason is, and it’s what’s been amusing when young people talk about how it’s a new phenomenon, is that it’s old-fashioned weekly television. It’s engaged people in conversations and in community, which they may have lost in many other areas, we’re all disappeared into our silos and echo chambers. It’s given people something to talk about and think about. They are, I wouldn’t say their morality tales, because Mike’s far too interesting deliver redemptive stories but this season, particularly, he delved into areas of spirituality and serious existential questions that people weren’t necessarily prepared for in The White Lotus. We, the cast, and the audience who watched it last night, were all moved, and were far more contemplative, I think, than they were planning for, definitely.

In terms of being different, I know that I enormously have been experiencing life in a bubble, but nonetheless, it felt like the most talked about television show on the planet. Now, granted, that’s because we were going around talking about it ourselves, but I’ve never been stopped so many times in the street or airports and by such a massively different group of people everywhere we go. It feels, in a world where there’s some pretty challenging things happening, dark clouds are gathering, and we’re also worried about the future, like a very, very welcome distraction.

DEADLINE: I appreciate I’m also in that bubble but most people I’ve spoken to this week have brought up who they think dies in the finale.

ISAACS: I think that’s a fabulous narrative slight of hand, or red herring from Mike. Because what’s happening while you’re thinking about that and talking about that is on another level, maybe even unconsciously, you’re thinking about who am I? Am I my reputation, do my friendships count? What is it that grounds me in the world and what matters? I don’t know if [Mike] has done that in previous seasons as much. My least favorite question from the 8 billion interviews I’ve in the last few weeks is, what do you want people to take from the show? You go ‘whatever they want, and don’t ask me Mike’s the artist’ and I’m pretty sure, knowing him reasonably well, but he doesn’t boil it down to a bumper sticker. He holds a mirror up to nature – I tried my best to do that as Tim – and not judge or have any message, just try and be as human as possible and allow people to take from it whatever it is that inspires them or intimidates them.

DEADLINE: How much of the rest of the plot were you aware of?

ISAACS: Well, we’d all read it. We’re all given the scripts right at the beginning all of them. There were no secrets for us. However, like a lot of my colleagues, I didn’t really want to know too much about other people’s stories, because I’m such a huge fan of the show. I read those very quickly in January, when we got the scripts, but I never looked at them again, because I wasn’t on the set when they filmed those things. So, I had forgotten what happened to people, and reminded me, in some ways, of Harry Potter, people assume that you’re in it and you’re part of the mechanics of it. But I don’t really want to think about how the sausage is made and was as moved and surprised and delighted by Mike’s skills as everyone else last night. I did know who died, but I didn’t know all of who died and in what circumstances. I just knew who wasn’t going to be there, who ended up in the body bags. But I forgot now it happened and why. When it finished, I was as tense as anybody else. I felt like I’d done 1000 sit ups.

DEADLINE: One of the most emotional moments for me was when Timothy was holding his son, Lochlan, thinking he’d killed him. How was that for you?

ISAACS: It’s funny you think that’s the most emotional moment. Acting is pretend, but you pretend as much as you possibly can, meaning you try not to be pretending at all, and so I’ve had to be suicidal and think that my children deserve to die and then try and kill everybody. When I read the scripts, I was terrified, in an excited way, in the way that actors crave. I knew that was something that was gonna be very difficult to do. There’s a fear that the muse won’t arrive. I’ve been talking about acting a lot, and I’m not sure I’ve ever said anything sensible in 40 years of interviews. I don’t really know what happens. I know that when I was younger, I used to plan things. For decades now I don’t plan anything, I try and be the thing as much as possible. All the way through this season, as much as I was having fun with my colleagues when we weren’t working, when we’re working, I was trying to feel the things that Timothy is feeling, and think the things he’s feeling, which are pretty cataclysmic for him, and to get into a place where you think the people you love will be better off dead than what’s facing them, or that your own ego is such that you can’t take what they think about you. The combination of those two has been challenging all the way through. It wasn’t any more challenging holding my dead son.

When you’re younger, you play lots of cops and soldiers. I have friends just a few years older than me who are playing a whole series of people with Alzheimer’s in a row, and I seem to be at the age where I do a lot of holding of or thinking of dead children. It’s not the first time that my children have died on screen. It’s a horrible thing to do it simply because, of course, I have children. I’m not thinking about my kids, I’m thinking about Sam. I mean, we became very, very close, all of us. I did think of Patrick and Sam and Sarah Catherine, in some way as quasi children of mine.

DEADLINE: That’s very sweet, particularly given how long you were in Thailand.

ISAACS: That makes it sound schematic. The fact is, we just grew very close, we had a lot of time together, and they’re younger than me, and I really adore them and admire them. They’re all special people, and hopefully I wasn’t too patronizing, but they would ask me stuff about whatever, maybe I was pontificating about life and about our jobs and what I thought about scenes and stuff. It was a natural bond. People who don’t work in our business don’t quite understand the instant intimacy that happens when you’re just working with people in the world of pretend, but also opening up, talking about the building blocks of personality, those are discussions which reveal far more of yourself than somebody would sit next to in an office for 50 years. I didn’t have to stretch that much to think about losing a son, I held Sam, who I absolutely adore, in my arms.

Those were the scenes when I read it, frankly, I was worried about and doubtful about taking the job. When I looked at five or six episodes where, in which I was just out of my head on drugs, and I worried about making those interesting for an audience, whether I could communicate what was going on behind the eyes for Timothy. But when I looked at what happened in episode eight, I thought, I’m suddenly, I’m in a Greek tragedy, and I’m going to have to raise my game. Those are the things that actors either run from or run towards. With Mike at the helm, I ran towards it.

DEADLINE: Timothy spent the first half of the season with a phone glued to his head and the second half with a gun pointed at his head, high on Lorazepam.

ISAACS: You say the word high and I couldn’t help but think of the brilliant Murray Bartlett in season one, who was on uppers. Lorazepam basically puts you to sleep, it makes you completely dopey, which is not the most televisual dynamic that anyone’s looking for. I was trying to make it clear that the drugs weren’t working. He was trying to obliterate his brain as much as possible, because the thoughts were unconscionable, but it was failing, because otherwise I’d just be that idiot falling asleep in the corner of the shot.

DEADLINE: The other moment I wanted to ask you about was on the boat when he’s with his family and they get all of their devices back. There’s something redemptive about that moment.

ISAACS: Yes, but there’s something else, though. The words of the monk are echoing in his head as he looks at the water, and when he first heard them in the monastery, it felt like a license to kill himself and maybe to kill members of his family. There was some relief in being told that he would no longer be separate from the world and this sense of separation and otherness and the pressure to always be better than other people, maintain that distance, maintain that sense of being, maintaining the reputation and the legacy of his family, that when the monk said to him that it feels like it might be an enormous relief, but at that point it’s license to kill people. Then when he comes very close to killing his family, at the very last second, when he talks to them and realizes, in the end, his love is greater than his fear, and he sees the water off the boat, he realizes, if you just accept your fate, things will be okay and all the things he had thought previously were important, evaporated, they will survive and whatever comes their way, no matter how unpleasant it is, it’s part of life, and that they will rejoin common humanity, which is a better place to be than above and separate from anyone. He has the biggest spiritual journey of anyone, not just in the show, but in anything Mike’s ever written, The irony being, he’s the man who was least seeking that.

The thing about Mike’s writing is it’s sort of distractingly entertaining, you don’t take the time to realize how utterly perfect it is. Not only did he write a weekly television show, which required a week in between episodes for it to kind of marinate and percolate so that people talk about it, but there’s not a wasted syllable. Things like when Timothy gets there and he says ‘I just want to work out’. It makes it very clear that the last thing he wants is any of the other things that are on offer, either at this hotel or from Thailand. Of course, he’s the guy for whom Thailand most delivers that change, and that’s true of everybody else’s storyline. If anyone wants to take the time to go back and examine it, there’s not a word or a gesture wasted on the whole show.

DEADLINE: Talking of Mike, you’ve called him very collaborative. Can you give me an example of what you mean?

ISAACS: I’ve worked with people or directors who don’t even look up from the script and think it’s a radio play and it’s Shakespeare and they’re generally the least talented, the least secure people. Mike is so

so able and so brilliant and human in his storytelling that he wants input from everybody, all the time. Whilst his script is brilliant, it also changes all the time. He doesn’t get credit as a director because he’s writing is so good but he creates an atmosphere of play on set. You can happily go off piste to wherever you like if he likes what you’re doing. Also he’s texting you and chatting with you right from the first day he sends the script. I had a whole bunch of input on a whole bunch of different things, not that it’s a free for all by any means and all of this is filtered through the prism of his genius. No one really needs to see how the sausage is made and take it all apart, but there were a lot of things I did, and I know many other people did. He’s happy to delegate ownership of the characters. Funny enough, we all met not last night, but the night before, for a drink, which really felt like a big goodbye, and when we were all talking to him, you can’t help but think this is the last chance I’ll have to tell him how grateful I am and how wonderful the work is. He’s raised the bar so high that none of the rest of us want to take another job so he’s going to have to support us for the rest of our lives. He was very insistent to say ‘I don’t care about it, but I just want to know that you had a good time’. He said, ‘If I I didn’t do this, I’ll be a travel agent. Did you all enjoy yourself?’ You can sense that on the set that he knows the best work will come if you feel like we’re all telling the story together. He’s collaborative, like the very best and most secure people I’ve ever worked with.

Also, he very smartly, was sparing with himself. He had a mammoth task. He had to imagine it, then write it and prep it, but he was there for every single frame of all the shooting every day, for the whole time, and then in post. There was a slight bubble around him. He shared as much as he dared so it’s been lovely the last couple of days, and since we finished, to really get see who he is. I suppose you get to see who he is, through his insane, almost uncanny ability to inhabit every single one of the characters. I’ve been around some great writing before, and some of the great writing I’ve been around, you could swap dialog between people. Every single one of the characters in The White Lotus is so perfectly idiosyncratically uniquely defined by what they say and what they do, what they think, and that ability is such a rare thing.

DEADLINE: I heard you were wearing a Duke t-shirt last night. Was that a wind up?

ISAACS: Obviously, we cleared the t-shirt [in the show]. When you’re shooting, you don’t wear anything that wasn’t cleared, anything with a symbol or sign. That was a bit of a nonsense. Clearly, there were some different departments, one that complained about it and one that cleared it originally, but their real life alumni, there’s enough of a rogue’s gallery that I think they should worry slightly less about the fictional ones.

By the way, the reason I had the t-shirt, I was stuck at Charlotte airport and I came to LA to do a whole bunch of interviews and publicity but my cases didn’t arrive so I had to buy something at the airport and the only thing there was was an outlet selling things from North Carolina.

DEADLINE: I assumed you were just taking the piss.

ISAACS: Last night, I had all of my clothes but I thought it would be fun.

DEADLINE: There’s been a lot of online discourse about Timothy Ratliff, obviously the full-frontal thing, to Duke and plenty of other topics. How did you feel about that?

ISAACS: I’ve never experienced it before. I’ve been around a while and I’ve even been in things that were popular before, the only other thing that vaguely compares is Harry Potter. But anything that any of us said or did, or even wore for the last eight weeks, has gone massively viral over the internet, and that’s been strange. Getting more granular with it, there was a moment when I was asked constantly about the full-frontal thing and I thought I’d really like to kick that into touch, because it’s such a brilliant show, I’d like not to be the guy that was only ever asked about that. So, in one interview, I pushed back slightly, I thought I was being vaguely witty and when I looked at the Internet afterwards, I think something like five or maybe six people said that was wrong and mouthed off about it, which doesn’t matter because there were millions of people commenting on everything every day. But an outlet picked it up and said, fan were furious, there’s a backlash against and I thought that’s interesting, because it actually was five people. But then once the websites pick it up and talk about it, it looks like people are up in arms. Then it becomes self-fulfilling, and then some people are up in arms. Then I bothered to issue some statements, I said the things I said were misinterpreted, enormous, and it was extraordinary how a fuss developed, not over a genuine backlash, but over the desire to amplify five people writing something on the phone while they were doing who knows what, probably having sandwiches, sitting on the toilet. That’s been interesting. I’m totally fine with the things I’ve said and done, but it does make you far more self-conscious, because I like to just chat. When you do 100,000 interviews, you want to say something interesting or fun most of the time, just to change things up, but I’ve had to be a little bit more careful than I would be generally. Even in one of the interviews, someone asked ‘Who should play you in Harry Potter?’ I said Meryl Streep and they took it as a genuine suggestion so it’s been odd. It’s quite a relief, as you know, being English, to know that I’m tomorrow’s chip wrapper.

I’m from Liverpool, where everybody is a stand-up comedian, whether they’re funny or not, so there’s a cultural obligation to try and say something funny. I am stridently not earnest, I find it very difficult to say anything that I mean without dressing it up with a little bit of sarcasm or irony and that doesn’t look great in print. When we were in Thailand I was telling the younger cast to really enjoy the journey. There is no destination. Don’t think about what this might do, or that we’re in a giant hit show. It might not be a giant hit show. Who knows, if anyone will watch it. It doesn’t matter. Look at what we’re doing. Look at this lovely day we’re having. Try and be present all the time. It turns out it was a giant show, but I’m glad I enjoyed the journey, because it’s been slightly heady these last eight weeks. We’ve been feted everywhere, the center of, at least the center of our worlds. And I’m glad that I’m old enough to know that that wasn’t real life and that I’ll go on back to my very perfectly, often enjoyable, working life. I have a bunch of indie films coming out. People will not be throwing open their doors and giving me free clothes. People won’t stop me in the street talking about it, which is perfectly fine. I’m glad I don’t live in Los Angeles anymore, because one could get used to that treatment. That’s not why I do the job, and it’s not the real benefits of the job. You can see how, if you have that treatment constantly, how it could turn your head and lose track of the real things in life. I feel a bit like Tim Ratliff, I’m glad I’ve got my head screwed on.

DEADLINE: Once you work with Mike White, I imagine it’ll be tough to go and read other scripts.

ISAACS: That’s very perceptive. I haven’t worked since August, and partly because three or four indie films keep losing bits of money and pushing forward, but also partly because, thankfully, people are offering me work, they always were, but now maybe the standard will go up, or maybe there’ll be a bit more money, or maybe it’ll just be the same as normal. But my standards have gone up. It happens to me periodically. Every few years, I do something that I feel is one of the reasons I became an actor in the first place, telling a human story in a gripping way. Then I have to remind myself, after months and months of sitting at home that I actually like being on a set, and I like my job, and if I keep the bar that high, I’ll be an unpaid dog walker and I need to go back to work. I look forward to things coming in that are pretty good. If I wait for something that’s as great as Mike’s writing, I certainly won’t be in Deadline for a long time.