The White Lotus' Ratliff Brothers Were Blindsided By Season 3's Most Controversial Storyline

Put down your tropical drink and don't go party with any strangers if you haven't watched "Denials," the sixth episode of season 3 of "The White Lotus." Spoilers ahead!

Okay, so ... two brothers totally hooked up on the third season of Mike White's international anthology series "The White Lotus." Saxon and Lochlan Ratliff, the older and younger brothers played respectively by Patrick Schwarzenegger and Sam Nivola, who are "on vacation" in Thailand with their on-screen family, including father Timothy (Jason Isaacs), mother Victoria (Parker Posey), and sister Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), end up going to a party on a yacht in the season's fifth episode "Full-Moon Party," ready for a night of drinking and debauchery with Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) and Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood). Because Chelsea is devoted to her much older boyfriend Rick (Walton Goggins), she disappears when things get steamy, and in the following episode "Denials," we get a very full picture of what happened: Specifically, while Chloe and Lochlan were having sex, Lochlan also gave Saxon a proper "old fashioned."

In an interview with The Wrap after "Denials" aired, Nivola said he could barely even believe what he was reading when he first saw the episode's script. "I thought that there was a typo that screwed up the names — I was like 'me and him?'" Nivola told the outlet. "I was blown away — I was shocked but ... Mike [White] is a total genius ... and is a brilliant writer, obviously. Nothing is for shock value — it's all to serve the story and help flesh out these characters that are so complex. I ran with it. It made sense."

Schwarzenegger also spoke to The Wrap about this absolutely wild reveal, saying he thinks White wants this to present the audience with plenty of questions. "Mike wants it to be an open-ended conversation for the viewer to come up to their own ideas," Schwarzenegger said, regarding who "started it," so to speak. "Did Saxon want it? Did he not want it? Does he even remember it? Does he not? [...] Was is it these girls that pressured him into doing it? Was it not?"

Sam Nivola also sat down with Variety after this bombshell episode aired — which unexpectedly became the series' highest-rated installment to date, according to a report in Vulture — and said that when he and Patrick Schwarzenegger first met, the actor who would go on to play his on-screen older brother basically told him this scene was in the works, because it was part of Schwarzenegger's audition.

"When I got the part, I remember talking to Patrick Schwarzenegger, and one of his audition scenes was the scene with Chloe where she's like, 'Your brother jerked you off last night. You don't remember?' And he's like, 'No, I totally blacked out,'" Nivola recalled, presumably thinking that maybe the side was a misdirect or would change later. "So he told me that, and I was like, 'Weird ... I wonder what that's all about.' Then we both had to sign in our contracts that we were comfortable with nude scenes on camera. Then we got the scripts about a week later, and I read all of them in one sitting, on the plane to Thailand."

Nivola also notes, in this interview, that this entire thing marks his first-ever intimate scene on screen (which is so wild, considering), but that he felt particularly comfortable because he and Schwarzenegger had been filming for some time by then and became pretty good friends, but also said that made it slightly weird. "In the scene, Patrick and I are brothers, with this girl who we just met like the day before," the actor said. "It was very weird kissing Patrick because he's a really good friend of mine. And, you know, I'm straight, he's straight. It's already weird. It would have been easier if that was the first time we were meeting. Weirdly, it was easier to do things with Charlotte because there were no stakes. It's just this person I've just met. But Patrick was already like a brother to me. It felt sort of f***ed up."

Elsewhere in the Variety interview, Nivola was asked about the dynamic between Saxon and Lochlan — which, to be honest, is really weird from the start. Saxon is clearly pretty sex-obsessed (like, he talks about it all the time) and when he's nude in the brothers' shared room in the first episode, Lochlan doesn't look away. As Shanfield notes, when the brothers, egged on by Chelsea and Chloe, kiss in "Full-Moon Party," they just peck each other on the mouth at first before Lochlan pulls his brother back in. So what's the "deeper meaning" of Lochlan's fascination with his older brother? 

"I think it's something else," Nivola said when he was asked whether or not Lochlan is just actively attracted to his brother. "I think it comes from a sense of insecurity. He really looks up to both of his siblings, not from the point of view of a physical attraction. It's more curiosity, and trying to figure out which kind of person he is going to become. He tries to connect with him in whatever way he can."

"I think Lochlan is a people pleaser, who will try to get people to like him by any means necessary," Nivola continued, saying that he thinks Lochlan also wants to be Saxon, in a way. "Looking at Saxon while he's jerking off is not a sexual thing — it's more that he's studying him: 'Who is this guy? How can I get him to like me? How can I become more like him?' What he learns over the first few episodes is that Saxon is the sex guy. His primary motive in life is to make money and get laid. So, the thing on the boat is Lochlan's tragically misguided attempt at being like, "So, you're the sex guy. Let's do something in that realm and try to connect in some way.' It's obviously a big swing and a miss."

At the end of his interview with Variety, Nivola addresses the aftermath of the Ratliff brothers' wild night, which we see in its entirety in "Denials." As you might recall, Saxon remembers all of the facts first and is horrified; Lochlan is basically oblivious until he attends a meditation session with his sister Piper and has a sudden flashback to the previous night's events. So what happens now?

"You see in the latter half of episode 6 that Saxon is totally ignoring Lochlan, understandably, because he feels uncomfortable about everything that happened," Nivola explained. "How could he not feel that way? He finds it painful to even look at Lochlan. I think Lochlan regrets everything that happened, and he's also like, 'F***, everything I do is in service of trying to get my brother to like me. And now I've pushed him further away from me.' Lochlan is the orchestrator of his own downfall. The last two episodes are him grappling with that."

We don't know just yet how everything between Lochlan and Saxon will shake out, but with only two episodes left of "The White Lotus" season 3, there's sure to be even more fallout between the two brothers who ended up in a full-on "Game of Thrones" situation. "The White Lotus" airs new episodes on Sundays at 9 P.M. EST on Max and HBO.