Cast announcements for the fourth season of The White Lotus, set at Saint-Tropez’s Château de la Messardière, are now underway. Fans of the show were thrilled to learn that Sandra Bernhard, Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Coogan, and Vincent Cassel would be checking in for the series’ latest chapter.
On Tuesday, Deadline announced a number of new names, including Pakistani-American actor and comedian Kumail Nanjiani, singer and actress from the Marvel universe Chloe Bennet, and Charlie Hall.
Hall, the son of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Brad Hall, joins a long list of White Lotus “nepo babies,” including Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sam Nivola (son of Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola) and Charlotte Le Bon (daughter of Brigitte Paquette). The 28-year-old actor’s parents met on the set of Saturday Night Live, where they were both cast members.
Hall, who attended Northwestern University and played on the basketball team, made his on-screen debut in 2019 with a small role in his mother’s sitcom Veep, and has gone on to act in the series The Sex Lives of College Girls, as well as Love, Victor, Single Drunk Female and the reboot of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
But his new role on The White Lotus is sure to be his largest yet, bringing with it the usual debate over the merit of casting “children of”: do connections to famous families get weighed over the quality of the actors’ talent?
Schwarzenegger proved his chops on the last season of The White Lotus, where he played Saxon Ratliff. Last year, he responded to criticism in The Sunday Times, saying it’s “frustrating” when people put him in a box, adding “They’re not seeing that I’ve had 10 years of acting classes, put on [high] school plays every week, worked on my characters for hours on end or the hundreds of rejected auditions. Dave Bernard, the show’s producer, told the Hollywood Reporter that Shwarzenegger’s last name had actually “worked against him,” saying ”We didn’t want to cast him because of that. He was just so good.”
This article originally appeared in Vanity Fair France.
