Although she’s not really on social media, Meghann Fahy gets why the internet is obsessed with Daphne. The breakout star of The White Lotus season two dropped by Still Watching to discuss the momentous season finale which saw Daphne continuing to live her best life as the love triangle—square?—between herself, Cameron (Theo James), Ethan (Will Sharpe), and Harper (Aubrey Plaza) became even more complicated.
“I don’t have Twitter or TikTok, so I only really see what my friends send me and it just cracks me up,” she tells Vanity Fair. “Especially because her story line is one of the more sordid stories—for her to be in the face of all that and then be as sunshiny as she is—I totally get why that would be a character that people were like, ‘I wanna be her.’ Everything bad happens to her and she doesn’t care about any of it.”
Elsewhere on the season finale of Mike White’s magnum opus, we bid a final adieu to Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), the “diva of Palermo” who makes a valiant effort to get rid of the crew of murderous gays before falling to her untimely demise. Unlike her boss, Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) makes it out of Palermo alive, and even ends up getting Albie’s (Adam DiMarco) number after he gets burned by Lucia (Simona Tabasco), who ends the series walking off into the streets of Sicily, arm in arm with The White Lotus’s new piano player, Mia (Beatrice Grannò). Still Watching hosts Richard Lawson and Chris Murphy unpack the episode and finally determine who came closest to predicting the events that unfolded in the thrilling finale. Listen below, and find a partial transcript of the Fahy interview as well.
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Vanity Fair: I think the defining scene of the episode is when you’re on the beach with Ethan and he says, “I think something might have happened [with Harper and Cameron].” You do so much incredible face acting before Daphne collects herself. Can you tell us a little bit about filming that?
Meghann Fahy: Well, I think we knew going into it that it was a pretty important moment, so we really took our time with it. Mike was great in that way, anyway. I never felt like we rushed through something and didn’t really get a chance to sort of sit with it. And that scene is definitely an example of that. We did it a bunch of different ways. For me, it was really exciting to see how it ended up cutting together, because I didn’t really know what he was gonna choose—which sort of vibe he was maybe gonna pick of the ones that we played with. I love that scene for Daphne. I think it’s a moment for her where she’s, in her own way, being empathetic to Ethan and wanting to make him feel better.
It’s so compelling because we see Daphne sort of take in the information and then make a decision, and the decision is ambiguous. What do you think pains Daphne more—the potential Cameron betrayal or the Harper betrayal?