The second season of The White Lotus, HBO’s acidic limited turned anthology series, will probably be remembered for several things: it was a rare monoculture-ish moment that got people to tune into scripted television at the same time each week, a triumph for returning star Jennifer Coolidge, and one of the best (and horniest) examinations of sexual politics on TV. The season finale, which aired this week (spoilers ahead), stuck the landing and confirmed creator, writer and director Mike White’s vision of “a bedroom farce with teeth”. Much will be made of the finale’s reveals, the slapstick demise of Coolidge’s Tanya and the show’s icily cynical core, but I would like to submit for recognition one of the second season’s chief delights: Meghann Fahy’s performance as deceptively layered, nouveau-riche housewife Daphne Sullivan.
Fahy, a Broadway and soap opera veteran best known as striving fashion assistant Sutton Brady on the Freeform series The Bold Type, has been rightfully hailed as the breakout star of a stacked ensemble that includes more established names as Coolidge, Michael Imperioli, F Murray Abraham, Aubrey Plaza and Theo James. It’s not just because her incarnation of Daphne is fascinating to watch – bubbly and seemingly aloof, inner calculations briefly rippling beneath her smooth-brained surface. It’s that Fahy’s Daphne is so much more interesting than the character, the blissfully apolitical wife to a skeevy finance bro, could be.
It’s the most surprising and rewarding performance in a season of top to bottom great ones. Plaza, though excellent, is playing to type – furrowed brow, affixed scowl, deadpan delivery. Simona Tabasco’s Lucia, another standout, is pretty transparently (and brilliantly) playing off everyone’s vulnerabilities for her own gain. Coolidge’s Tanya is still a farcical vortex of need. But Daphne? Daphne could be an easily skewered caricature – a perennially chipper rich woman who does not work, who can’t remember if she voted, and who seems perplexed as to why anyone (Harper) would lose sleep over the state of the world. In lesser hands, she would be that plus the wrinkle of reciprocal adultery, as written in the script. Fahy makes her fascinatingly elusive. How much does she know? How much does she care? How many cards is she holding? (Did the blonde, blue-eyed trainer father her blonde, blue-eyed child?!) Why is she doing anything that she does?
Meghann Fahy is SUCH a good actor. these 30 seconds of Daphne processing her husband’s affair (and then calculating how she’s gonna get back at him) are perfection#TheWhiteLotus pic.twitter.com/razdMtDu5G
— Spencer Althouse (@SpencerAlthouse) December 12, 2022
It’s not hard to imagine a version of The White Lotus where Daphne is a milder side character or a complement to Plaza’s Harper instead of the most intriguing of the bunch. Instead, Fahy performs Daphne as both seemingly open and guileless and the most opaque of all the characters. She’s a true player of the power games with the stealthiest costume, occasionally glimpsing a jagged edge she then conceals with a fleeting acknowledgment.
Take, for example, Fahy’s standout finale scene that has been making the rounds on social media. Daphne beckons Will Sharpe’s Ethan, pouting post-brawl with her husband, to tell her what’s wrong; Ethan reveals his suspicions about a dalliance between their spouses. Over the course of about 30 seconds, Fahy’s freckled, radiant face registers a full grief cycle, as clear and ephemeral as clouds drifting over the sun. Her eyes moisten and break contact; she looks down, furrows her brow, stares at the sea, then sets her face and tells Ethan he has nothing to worry about. “You don’t have to know everything to love someone. A little mystery? It’s kinda sexy.” We know that she knows from her unwavering gaze; her face moves casually, her eyes do not.
The dialogue that serves basically as a series thesis statement – you never really know someone, better to be clear-eyed than believe in romance – is all Mike White, but it’s Fahy who sketches in the detail. The shadow of shock, the shade of hurt directed (in my read) at Harper, the only person on the trip to whom she displayed genuine, non-transactional vulnerability. There’s calculation, and the daunting confidence of a woman who knows how to defuse a situation and disarm a man. An over-the-shoulder smize, as she leads Ethan to an isolated peninsula, of someone getting what she wants.
Most of the characters on The White Lotus contain hidden depths; White has a perennial fascination with the emotional loyalties (often to privilege) or undercurrents that lead to surprising behavior. Daphne is, on the script level, a complex character with ambiguous motivations – she rents a villa without telling her husband, implicitly admits to an affair with her trainer and gives dubious marriage advice to both Ethan and Harper. It’s Fahy’s performance that elevates her from dimensional to thrillingly unpredictable and inscrutable. In the end, her happiness doesn’t appear to be an act, as Harper initially suspected. Fahy allows us to glimpse all the work – sacrifices, recalibrations, reframes, tune-outs – required to achieve it, in a performance that deserves all the recognition.
