THE CURATED EDITION.
Reportage / Cannes
Mike White's fourth season unfolds during the Cannes Film Festival, between a castle in Saint-Tropez and the Croisette. The subject this time is fame, and the series is due on screen in 2027.
CULTURE · TELEVISION
The White Lotus has always understood that paradise is only interesting once something begins to rot. For its fourth season, Mike White has moved his guests to the most self-regarding fortnight on the Mediterranean calendar: the Cannes Film Festival, where beauty, money and ambition share the same red carpet.
HBO confirmed the season in January 2025, while the third was still airing. Filming began on the Riviera in the spring of 2026, and the network has slated the new episodes for 2027, without yet naming a date.
The third season, set at a wellness resort in Thailand, was the anthology’s most ambitious chapter: longer episodes, interlocking plots and characters wrestling with spirituality, guilt and the cost of their choices. It became the series’ most watched season to date, and confirmed that White could reinvent the formula without losing its signature blend of social satire, psychological drama and acid comedy.
The new season, White has said, is about fame. Its premise follows guests and staff over one week of the festival, and two rival film teams who arrive with pictures in competition, each lodged at a different White Lotus property.
The speculation of last year has settled into addresses. Airelles Château de la Messardière, a nineteenth-century castle above Saint-Tropez, plays the White Lotus du Cap, while the Hôtel Martinez on the Croisette becomes the White Lotus Cannes. Production has also filmed in Monaco and in Paris, where the Lutetia has been reported among the locations, and the crew was seen at the Palais des Festivals after the 79th festival closed in May. The choice marks a clear break from the Four Seasons properties that framed earlier seasons.
The rumoured all-star reunion did not materialise. Instead White has built a new ensemble that mixes Hollywood and French cinema: Laura Dern, Steve Coogan, Vincent Cassel, Ben Kingsley, Kumail Nanjiani, Chris Messina, Heather Graham, Rosie Perez, Sandra Bernhard, Max Greenfield, Max Minghella, Ari Graynor, Alexander Ludwig, AJ Michalka, Chloe Bennet, Ben Schnetzer and Pekka Strang, alongside the French actors Laura Smet, Corentin Fila and Nadia Tereszkiewicz. Helena Bonham Carter left the production a week into filming, and Dern stepped into a newly written role.
Whether the season opens, as tradition dictates, with a body is still unknown. White has hinted that he enjoys unsettling his own formula, and a story set inside the film industry gives him an obvious invitation to play with the audience’s expectations.
The series has always known that its viewers care less about the paradise than about what hides behind it. On the Riviera, with festival badges in place of room keys and champagne in place of welcome drinks, the most dangerous holiday on television is about to resume.
GABRIEL SILVEIRADO, FOR WAYFARER.
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