That dinner scene in The White Lotus? 3 actresses on memes, touching base, making friends

Carrie Coon, Leslie Bibb and Michelle Monaghan discuss their characters’ friendship and how their off-screen bond enhanced their chemistry

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(From left) Michelle Monaghan as Jaclyn, Carrie Coon as Laurie and Leslie Bibb as Kate in a still from The White Lotus season 3. The trio talk about filming the show. Photo: TNS

Published: 4:15am, 9 Apr 2025

It is a few days before the penultimate episode of The White Lotus season three drops, and Leslie Bibb, Carrie Coon and Michelle Monaghan are convening virtually to discuss their fascinating and disturbingly accurate depiction of female friendship.

Their characters – Jaclyn (Monaghan), an actress newly married to a younger man; Laurie (Coon), a single mum and lawyer; and Kate (Bibb), a wealthy wife from Texas – are childhood friends on a girls’ trip in Thailand that has all the tension and suspense of a horror movie.

Unlike others on the show, these blonde besties are not facing financial ruin, nor are they troubled souls seeking to avenge their father’s death, but their A-plus passive aggression and impeccable gossiping have been just as compelling to watch.

Who cares about a corpse when you have got friends wondering if you have sandblasted your face?

To help make that dynamic believable, Bibb says the trio began a text thread after they were cast as a way to brainstorm the characters’ shared history. “We were like, ‘OK, how old were we [when we] met?’ I think we decided on seven, eight,” she says.

“Where are we from? I think we picked Ohio, Midwest [in the US]. Then, we just started sending photos of ourselves when we were kids. And it was really nice to have that because you can just look at it and suddenly you’re like, ‘Oh, I do know this person’.”