Did Murray Bartlett really poop in ‘The White Lotus’?

Poop or prop?

The White Lotus is an American satirical comedy-drama television series created, written, and directed by Mike White that premiered on HBO on July 11, 2021. The first season, consisting of six episodes, concerns the lives of the staff and guests at a tropical resort in Hawaii. The show was then renewed as an anthology series, which will tell the story of a different group of travelers during their stay at another White Lotus property.

But why are we talking about this series?

That’s because in the first season finale (episode 6 of season 1) there’s an explicit scene where Murray Bartlett (who played doomed resort manager Armond) poops in Shane Patton’s (Jake Lacy) suitcase.

When Armond learns he’s about to be fired from his post as manager of The White Lotus, as he enters the much-discussed Pineapple Suite, where Shane and Rachel (Alexandra Daddario) have been staying, he takes a big shit right in Shane’s suitcase.

Within a few moments, Shane’s back in the room. He discovers the turd in his luggage, and he hears Armond in the room. He grabs a knife, inspects the room, finds Armond, and impulsively stabs him in the chest. Armond bleeds out in the Pineapple Suite’s bathtub, not even wiping his ass.

Did Bartlett really poop?

The scene looks real, and you couldn’t believe someone would actually do that on a film set, but scenes don’t actually happen in real-time; every single shot you see in a movie or a TV show is typically performed over and over again so that the editing team has options in post-production. Imagine Bartlett having to poop in a suitcase over and over again.

Bartlett, in an interview, basically confirmed that what we saw was a bit of good old-fashioned Hollywood FX.

Here’s his answer

“All I can say is that when I saw it, I was shocked. I did not expect that it was going to be so explicit and look so real. I think it’s so brilliant in terms of the shock value. It was very methodically done, and very respectfully done, for me, which was really great. Those scenes are always weird to do and something like that, obviously it’s just going to be awkward. There’s no way around it. Who’s going to be comfortable taking a shit in a suitcase with your pants around your ankles? All I can say is I give great props to the props department. They did an amazing job with it”.

In another interview, Bartlett again expressed just how shocked he was at how real the defecation scene looked. “That’s the magic of television”, he said. “I was equally shocked when I saw it. I was like, Oh my God, I didn’t realize it was gonna be that graphic”.

But his death scene partner, Lacy, alluded to “how the fecal sausage is made” during an interview of his own referring implicitly to “a rig that was hiding in the shadows behind Bartlett”. Lacy also believes CGI was used to create the scene, according to the story.

In that interview, Lacy also mentions that he arrived at the set thinking the scene was going to involve “massive, embarrassing, explosive diarrhea that was going to blanket the entire suitcase and hotel room” because writer/director Mike White told him that was the case. When he arrived, curious how that would be done, White told him the truth. “He was like, ‘We’re not doing that”, Lacy said. “That’s disgusting. I was fucking with you…'”.

He also explains that the way things happened in the finale wasn’t always set definitively. One option had Armond being stabbed and falling back against the wall for what would have certainly made a quite gross visual. Bartlett would “have to slide down the wall and have these skid marks as he dies”, as Lacy described. “That was the grossest, funniest, most demoralizing death. Sliding down the wall like that. Alas, we didn’t do it”.

Source menshealth.com