With Fashion Mishap, Actor Jason Isaacs Joins an Exclusive 'White Lotus' Club

On the first episode of Season 3 of "The White Lotus," Saxon Ratliff (hunky Patrick Schwarzenegger) walked across his hotel room naked exposing his ass for his younger brother Lochlan (Sam Nivola) and all the world to see. Moments later he stood in front of a mirror brushing his teeth and showing, if only for seconds, the ample girth between his legs. When he caught his brother staring too intently, he shut the door; but the moment captured what Mike White's hit HBO series does so well – use nudity to create unease and controversy, in this case suggesting something incestuous between the siblings.

And to prove that the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, the third episode had another rattling Ratliff full-frontal moment, this time when the boys' dad Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs) opened his bathrobe and exposed his substantial member to his family, which include his wife Victoria (Parker Posey), his two sons, and his eldest daughter Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), whose interest in interviewing a Buddhist monk for her senior thesis is the reason the Ratliffs traveled to The White Lotus in the first place. The moment was brief, but alarming.

And the moment made Isaacs an exclusive member of the White Lotus Dick Club, whose previous members include Steve Zahn (Season 1) and Theo James (Season 2), along with Schwarzenegger. Why it happened has more to do with the elder Ratliff's rattled emotional state due to being in Thailand while his financial empire is fracturing in the States as the FBI investigate him for money laundering. Having given up his phone the day before, he turned to sneaking Lorazepam from the self-medicating Victoria. This has turned him into something close to a zombie – little wonder he didn't realize he was exposing himself.

Click here to watch the NSFW scene.

Isaac joked about the moment to Entertainment Weekly: "Yeah, it is now in my contract for every show I do, so we'll see. It'll get easier, hopefully."

You should be asking what it was like for us to watch it," commented Schwarzenegger tells EW, to which Isaacs let out another big laugh.

While the cringe factor was high, the family didn't seem terribly phased by it. Victoria rolled her eyes and laughed, Saxon laughed, Lochlan cringed, and Piper hid her face in embarrassment. But Isaac looked at what has brought his character to this point.

"He's drugging himself into a stupor to try not to think about the fact that his entire life is blowing up and trying to work out what to do about it," Isaacs told EW. "It was actually quite challenging – I remember reading the scripts thinking, 'Wow, I've got to keep my powder dry for five or six episodes, and then this s--- really kicks off.' You haven't seen other things that are coming, but I just remember thinking, 'I better dig deep and produce something here,' because there's a lot of parts you can go through and tell a very dramatic story without your character going through anything extreme. But there's some big, old acting coming up."

He went on to describe the Ratliff story arc as being "Shakespearean tragedy stuff" as Timothy continues to unravel. "He's been bottling it up for a very long time," he continued. "There is a point coming when they leave – if they make it and they're alive, because who knows – but it's going to be unavoidable, the big secret he has been harboring."

Isaacs wondered how well he portrayed Timothy's breakdown. "I don't know how I pulled it off. "The audience will see whether I did or not. It'll be up to them to judge, but I just remember thinking, 'I've got to go big – go big or go home.' And then when things happen that I can't talk about particularly, something else had to kick in, and there's a mania and a terror that you have to access. You've got to get there. I mean, you've got to be as real as you can. And yeah, there was some inner gear changes required."

While he said the dialogue scenes came easy, it was much harder for him to do the physical stuff. "It didn't feel easy because first of all, I like words. I like talking. And not that characters should talk all the time, but I knew that I was unable to share with anybody else, apart from the audience, what was going on for me. And that was done mostly wordlessly in a drugged stupor, so that was always going to be a challenge, not to just be the boring guy falling asleep."

One thing is clear – Isaacs wasn't the boring guy falling asleep.