Kiwi star Morgana O’Reilly on her upcoming role in The White Lotus
An unresolved mystery: Morgana O’Reilly is sworn to secrecy about her role in White Lotus. Photo / Tony Nyberg
It is not every day that you get up, turn on your computer and encounter an enchantress, a witch, smiling at you via video link. It is hard to know which of us – the enchantress, the witch who is otherwise known as the actor Morgana Le Fay Naomi Jane O’Reilly, or me – is more excited.
“I feel like I have the weight of the nation behind me,” she says. “The excitement of a nation behind me!”
We are both really quite dizzy and most definitely dippy over the news that she has been cast in the third season of HBO’s luxuriously loopy The White Lotus. In case you have been confined to a desert island with only a coconut tree for company, it is set in fictional, super-luxury resorts where the super-rich, super-screwed-up and super-bored people go. Just, you know, for something to do.
They mostly get super-scammed or murdered. In the meantime, they get to wear ultra-expensive clobber and eat and drink ultra-expensive food and plonk and be rude to under-paid natives before getting the ending they deserve. It’s revenge for rudeness to the poor people, who have to cater to their every whim while wearing their fakest smiles.
The most famous cast member, thus far, was the wonderful Jennifer Coolidge, who played the, yes, luxuriously loopy Tanya. She survived the attempts of “the evil gays” to murder her on the luxury yacht they lured her to, only to leap from the boat and cave in her over-coiffured head.
Perhaps, suggested one fan, O’Reilly will turn out to be Tanya’s long-lost daughter. That would be fun. This is a fun story: two weeks after she sent off her audition tape, she got a text while at a friend’s wedding. The text, from her agent, said: “Oh my gosh. We’ve just had the most amazing feedback from the casting agent of The White Lotus.” The text arrived just as the bride was about to walk down the aisle.
O’Reilly’s first thought was, “Oh, don’t make this about me.” Her second was: “I wanted to stop the wedding! ‘I just have something to say … Does anybody know a little show called The White Lotus?’” The amazing thing about this is that mostly actors audition and then hear nothing for months, or just nothing at all. After a couple of weeks, she was told that there was still strong interest from the creator and director of the show, Mike White, and that she should hear in the next few days. She thought: “Ah, I can still just enjoy this. I still get to just enjoy the buzz of the hope, the dopamine, because I know I’m not staring down the barrel of three months of waiting. And maybe …” She likens getting those frequent rejections to turning her into “a lumbering drunk at a bar who wants to pick fights with everybody”.
The next day at 7am, she was told she had the part. “So respectful, so loving and lovely. And I just got to be fizzy and excited in the kind of way that you dream about when you first start out.”
Fabulous at being famous
You imagine that she is almost perpetually fizzy and excited but, of course, she’s not. Nobody is, especially not when you have been in the precarious game that is being an actor. She is 38. The White Lotus might make her famous. She would be fabulous at being famous.
Would she like to be famous? “I would like to not have to prove myself with every single job, every single prospect of a job. You know, after 17 years of doing this, I feel like, with every single audition, I have to prove what I can do.” It sounds exhausting. “And semi-insulting, actually,” she says.