Aloha, Armond! Murray Bartlett on 'The White Lotus's' Shocking & Surprising Finale

Spoiler alert: this story reveals plot details about the finale of "The White Lotus."

There are no major characters in "The White Lotus," the recently completed HBO anthology series that will return next year, but not in the luxe Hawaiian resort where the first season was filmed during the pandemic that is said to cost $6,000 a night.

But if one actor emerges from the show as its star, it is Murray Bartlett, the out Australian actor best-known for his role on HBO's "Looking." On "The White Lotus" he plays Armond, the resort manager who loses his sobriety in a spectacular fashion when he discovers a cache of drugs left on the beach by a two teenage guests.

But Armond's downfall begins before finding the drugs when he mistakenly books a honeymooning rich kid Shane (Jake Lacy) into the wrong suite. Throughout the show's six weeks, it was thought that Lacey's wife Rachel (Alexandra Daddario), whose coffin was being loaded onto a jet in the opening episode. But it turns out it is Armond, who in what turns out to be one of the show's most discussed scenes, breaks into Shane's room and defecates in his luggage. Trying to escape, he is stabbed by Jake who senses someone is in the room and grabs a knife. And after Armond falls into an oversized bathtub clutching his wound, he gets a look of relief on his face.

"In the last frame, alive or most likely dead, Armond is smiling–and at peace," writes the Daily Beast in an interview with Bartlett. When asked if he knew "Armond would die, or at least appear to, affect Bartlett's performance," Bartlett says: "I think so. Towards the I think he's hurtling towards that moment of joy. In that last moment, he's finally released from the hell he's been living. It's a relief."

He continues: "It's tragic that it has to end that way, but what's brilliant about it is that it shows how Armond is a casualty of the societal system we have, where we treat people better at the top, and as you go down you treat people worse and worse. And when you do that you drive those people crazy because it's so unfair and fucked up. I feel like Armond is an expression of that frustration. He's like, 'I'm going to fly towards that moment.'"

Armond also becomes the focus of the queer content on out writer/director Mike White's series, which turned out to be a summer hit for HBO. But it isn't until his bender that it expresses itself in self-destructive ways – doing drugs, hitting on a guest with gay issues and, in the show's most talked-about scene, gets caught performing analingus on a younger co-worker. His death, though, has nothing to do with his being gay."(F)or me Armond being gay has nothing to do with him dying. It feels like whatever happened to him would have been tragic, because of his role in the hierarchy and the nature of the circumstances. It made sense to me as a character. It didn't feel like it was any kid of derogatory diss on queer people or a gay man."

He adds that he saw Armond as "a sort of functioning addict until he gets to the point where he is not functioning. There's a brittleness that is not obvious to anyone when they see him. He's on the edge, not only because of the frustrations of what he wanted to do with his life but also staying sober in this insane world. He's just not coping."

Bartlett also tells BuzzFeed News that he didn't see Armond's end coming. "There's a part of me that's like, I want to keep playing this character forever, does he have to die? But at the same time, I feel like it's an amazing end for this character. It's so brilliant that it was unexpected. I love that kind of shock value. I also feel like he's a casualty of this whole nightmare of this sort of mini society or mini version of a society that he's sort of hooked up in. It's satisfying and horrifying in equal measure."

Bartlett also recalls when he first read the script with the explicit defecating scene. "When I got the script, I thought, 'Oh this isn't going to be that bad.' And then when I saw it I was like, 'Oh my god.' I had no idea it was going to be that explicit. But at the same time when I saw it on the page and more so when I saw it on screen it was the perfect moment in the story, because it's got the kind of shock value that really works in the moment. When I watched it, I wasn't expecting it to be so one-shot. I got to feel what it is to experience that moment in shock. I love that Mike White will go there."

Asked what the turd was made of, Bartlett demured. "I can't break the magic."

"Was it method poo?" the Daily Beast asked.

"I don't know if I would go that far," Bartlett says. "Let's just say when I watched it, I was shocked. I didn't know it would look that realistic."