VARIETY ‘Actors on Actors’: Parker Posey and Lisa Kudrow on THE WHITE LOTUS, Working with Mike White and More

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In a new conversation for VARIETY’s “Actors on Actors” issue, Parker Posey and Lisa Kudrow discuss whether Posey’s “The White Lotus” character, Victoria, knew her husband was taking her pills, Kudrow wanting to work with Mike White, multi-cam sitcoms, working with Nora Ephron, and more.

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Posey and Kudrow on whether Victoria knew Timothy was taking her pills:

Posey: “With Victoria, I was like, ‘Is Tim taking those pills?’ Does she know that he’s taking pills? I’m playing denial, and that took me a while. I even talked to Mike: ‘Does she know?’”

Kudrow: “How does she not know?”

Posey: “She does know. Of course she knows. She’s been married to him for 30 years.”

Kudrow: “Did he say that?”

Posey: “No. But they give that room for you to be in that state. I really love denial—what people are picking up on in their instincts, what they choose to reveal to their loved ones.”

Kudrow on whether she’d like to be on a future season of “The White Lotus”:

“Work with Mike White? Yes. I love Mike White. I’ve hung out with him at a party…He’s social. And ‘Brad’s Status’ was my favorite movie that year. I emailed him to let him know, because I had to—it was so good, I had to. I don’t do that a lot…And I might not be his cup of tea, which is allowed to happen too. But I do get nervous about inhabiting things that are too dark; I try to avoid that. But you didn’t really have to, except for the scenes where your head’s blown off. But it’s pretend.”

Posey and Kudrow on Posey’s character on “The White Lotus”:

Posey: “It was such a gift to have this middle-aged woman at this time in my career—to be this Southern woman. I was reading Tennessee Williams in junior high, so I just ate it up…My dad loved William Faulkner. He was a really big reader. He loved Flannery O’Connor and all those Gothic tales. And my mom’s mother dressed like a movie star; she’d go to Neiman Marcus and look at the things she liked, and she’d go home and make them herself.”

Kudrow: “I think my favorite thing in the whole season was asking Victoria, ‘What if we didn’t have anything?’ And the answer was the most honest thing I’d ever seen and made me respect her. Not respect her—”

Posey: “I know what you mean. When I read the line, that hit me the most out of the eight episodes, and I knew exactly how to say it. There’s such a cadence. A lot of people like to improvise and add things. But when things are really tight, I love how it sounds.”

Posey and Kudrow on their experiences with multi-cam sitcoms:

Posey: “It’s like tap dancing and really having to make that step. It’s not exactly formulaic, but it’s hitting some kinds of notes. I would say stuff on ‘Will & Grace,’ and people would laugh, and I didn’t get it. I didn’t think it was funny.”

Kudrow: “Was it a joke that they had written?”

Posey: “Maybe. Yeah, I think so.”

Kudrow: “That happens sometimes.”

Posey: “It was very athletic.”

Kudrow: “They’re always throwing new things at you. All of us got new things as we were doing it…It became fun. It was fun the whole time because the cast had fun. Phoebe was so far from who I was as a human being, it was work—I needed to justify everything she was saying in my head so that it felt like she meant it and it was real to her. It was a lot of work. I remember Season 2 or 3, I went, ‘Oh my God, I’m not doing the work.’ And LeBlanc went, ‘What’s the matter with you? You’re her. You don’t have to.’”

Posey and Kudrow on Nora Ephron:

Posey: “We were both Nora Ephron ladies back in the ’90s…What did you do with Nora?”

Kudrow: “I did ‘Hanging Up,’ which she wrote with [her sister] Delia. Diane Keaton directed it. We had great food every day because Nora was around. And then I did another movie that Nora directed, and John Travolta was in it—’Was in it?’ How’s that? It was a John Travolta movie, and I was in it.”

Posey: “And he was an angel or something, right?”

Kudrow: “No, that was ‘Michael,’ and that was a great movie. This one was disappointing. I remember Nora called me once—I was working on ‘Friends’—and she went, ‘When are you finished with this show? Why do you keep doing it?’ I was like, ‘Well, some good reasons.’”

Posey: “I remember she came up to me once and said, ‘Just be funny,’ and that was the note.”

[Photo Credit: Peggy Sirota for Variety Magazine]

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