Justice for Belinda! Give her everything she wants and needs! At least, that's how I feel following what happened to Natasha Rothwell's character in season one of The White Lotus. And with any luck, we'll hopefully get exactly that in the third season of Mike White's popular dramatic satire of the excessively wealthy, because Belinda's back, baby! And she's going to (hopefully) get her groove back after the deeply thoughtless way Tanya McQuaid (Jennifer Coolidge) treated her in the series' first installment.
Rothwell recently spoke to Entertainment Weekly about her hotly anticipated return to the series, and how she was "gagged" watching it all unfold on set.
"I would be on set, even when it wasn't my day shooting, just to watch the magic unfold," Rothwell explained. "And I would be gagged—as if I hadn't already read all the scripts! I'd be like, 'Oh, s--t.' I really do think that this season is magic. That's the only word."
As for her part in it? Rothwell's Belinda is going to straddle both sides of the world, as she's at the Thailand outpost of the luxe resort hotel on a work exchange program. "She's still working at the White Lotus, and she's in Thailand doing sort of an exchange program to learn more about the wellness programs that the Thailand White Lotus offers," Rothwell revealed.
"She's going to be a guest for the first time, even though she's taking classes and it's a work trip," she added. "She's staying at the hotel, which is something that she hasn't done before, and so we get to see her really dip her toe in the other side of life of the upstairs/downstairs of White Lotus."
And in doing so, Rothwell explained, "She gets a firsthand look at some of the things that I think went unnoticed by her [in] season 1. It's a really cool exploration of status and her journey and reconciling the fact that her dreams of owning the spa never came to fruition, so what do you do? 'I'm going to pick myself up and learn something new,' and still grow in her own way."
After being "so devastated by Tanya taking what little hope she had and shattering it," when she pulled funding for the spa she and Belinda had discussed, Rothwell's outlook for Belinda's season three trajectory feels hopeful.
Since the happenings of season one, Belinda's "been trying to dig herself out of that sadness and really be inspired again," Rothwell explained. "Her purpose for coming to Thailand is to have a dream again."
Anybody else absolutely chomping at the bit for the season three premiere date—February 16—to hurry up and get here already?
