Spoilers for Episode 2 of The White Lotus Season 2 on HBO.
Mike White’s resort drama The White Lotus is serving up even more complicated relationship dynamics (and nudity) in its second season, and the most recent episode sees Michael Imperioli’s character Dominic indulging in a threesome in a hot tub with sex worker Lucia (Simona Tobasco) and her friend Mia (Beatrice Grannò). Which was a pretty uncomfortable experience for the former Sopranos actor, whose real-life spouse Victoria happened to be in the same building.
“We were living and working in the San Domenico Palace in Taormina, Sicily, which was really fantastic, until one night when it wasn’t fantastic because I had to shoot a scene where my character has a menage a trois in a hot tub with two of my great Italian co-stars, Simona Tobasco and Beatrice Grannò, who are fabulous actresses,” Imperioli told Jimmy Fallon.
“But this is well into the shoot, and we were friends by that point, now we’ve got to do this sex scene in a tub. So we’re doing it in a big suite in the hotel, and Mike’s showing us how it’s going to work out, and we go out to the patio… And I realize my wife is asleep right above this hot tub. My room is right above this hot tub… If she wakes up, she’s going to look out the window and see me pretty much naked with my two Italian co-stars messing around in a hot tub.”
“These scenes are awkward enough,” he continued. “Now I’m worried about my wife looking out the window. And I get really tense… I’m like, Mike, you know, hot tub? I don’t think Dominic’s a hot tub guy.”
“So we do the scene, I’m looking, I’m thinking a lamp is going to come sailing down from the window. Luckily we got through it. But then I’m thinking, oh, she doesn’t want to make a scene because she knows the crew by now, we’ve all been there together, she’s waiting for me to get back upstairs. So now it’s 5 in the morning, I go in the room, it’s all dark, I brush my teeth, I get in the bed, she wakes up. She goes, how was it tonight? I’m playing it cool, it was ok. It was a long night? Yeah… You tired? Yeah, pretty tired. Was it hard? No, absolutely not!”
Philip Ellis is a freelance writer and journalist from the United Kingdom covering pop culture, relationships and LGBTQ+ issues. His work has appeared in GQ, Teen Vogue, Man Repeller and MTV.
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