THE WHITE LOTUS Star Patrick Schwarzenegger for MEN’S HEALTH’s Latest MH Flex Feature

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Patrick Schwarzenegger wants you to hate him. But maybe love him a little too? Playing the latest alpha-jerk to check into THE WHITE LOTUS, 31-year-old puts on a performance that’s as emotional as it is surprisingly physical. For the latest MH FLEX feature, the actor opens up to MEN’S HEALTH about his physical performance, how he trained for the role, and what other actors “playing jock-assh*le roles” inspired his performance.

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On making his performance a particularly physical one: “Saxon leads with his penis. The chest and shoulders are back, and he walks with bravado….I would walk, and Mike would scream from over the camera, ‘Walk richer! You don’t look rich enough! Be more rich! Rich, rich, rich!’ This guy’s a character, and if I just walked how I would normally walk on the beach, it doesn’t play the same way as if I’m strutting like I’m on a catwalk. This guy is just so over the top.”

On how things have changed as the season has gone on: “Once the alcohol and the drugs come into play, and everything that comes after that—that changes the way he carries himself….That’s where Mike hopefully really gets a performance out of me—in a weird way, you start to like Saxon, and you almost feel bad for him.”

On whether he followed any particular training plan before or during filming his role as Saxon: “I’ve always loved working out. We grew up with it. And I change my workout regimens and my eating based on what the character is supposed to be like. I got this job and within three to four weeks, we were filming. It was fast. My first day of filming on-set was when we shot all of my shirtless scenes at the pool, including episode 1, when I’m walking by the pool. And then about four months later, we did one other shirtless pool scene for episode 3. It’s really funny. If you actually look closely, you can see the difference in how much weight I’ve gained. I’m way tanner and way chunkier and more muscular in episode 3. I was working out constantly and eating chicken and rice and pad thai every day, all day. I gained 12 to 15 pounds throughout the seven months we were there, which was not great for continuity, but was fun.”

On the main note Mike White gave him for playing Saxon: “He wanted this guy to really be a douche, hateable but also lovable, someone you could end up rooting for. And he wanted him to be comedic relief throughout the season. And I think it’s working, because when I walk on the street now, everybody yells to me, ‘Saxon, I hate you, man! But you’re so good!’ ‘Saxon, you’re so crazy! I love it!’ But there will also be humanizing moments throughout the end of the season that might make people question or change their view on Saxon.”

On what inspiration he turned to when fleshing out his White Lotus character and his arc: “I wanted to build something that was new and different but that stems from Mike’s writing. I watched some of the actors I look up to playing jock-assh*le roles. I loved what Bradley Cooper did in Wedding Crashers. It could have been very one-note, but it played very well. Then there were elements of Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, who’s this really well-dressed, put-together guy—but there’s also something subtly off about him. I wanted people to have suspicions about Saxon, that something about him wasn’t clicking correctly.

“That’s what Mike does so well: He wants the audience to believe that anybody and everybody is capable of being the killer or the victim. He wants you talking about it and guessing. And with Saxon, I wanted to mix together those elements of absurd, suspicious, funny, and crazy.”

On growing very close with co-stars Sam Nivola and Sarah Catherine Hook: “They really do feel like younger siblings to me. We continue to talk daily. We have our own group chat, and we have our family group chat [with Isaacs and Posey]. But for seven months straight, I had breakfast, lunch, or dinner with them, every single day. We would hang out in each other’s rooms, in the pool, out in the ocean. There wasn’t a day that I didn’t see them or hang out with them. I’ll consider them friends for life. They’re going to be the flower girl and flower boy at my wedding.”

On what he can share about what’s coming our way in the final episodes: “It’s going to be an overtime, buzzer-beater type of situation. Just mayhem. Once we got to episode 5, everything started to tick up a notch. And it’ll keep ticking.”

[Photo Credit: David Urbanke for Men’s Health Magazine]

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