The White Lotus’s Murray Bartlett: ‘I looked down on soaps – and really regretted it’

I can give you a little taste of forest if you like,” says Murray Bartlett, grinning as if he were getting paid by the tooth. The Australian actor – whose wily, charismatic presence graced several of the past decade’s best TV shows, from The White Lotus to Looking to The Last of Us – picks up his webcam and spins it around. Gone is the plain white interior of his Massachusetts home. In its place: a window overlooking a wooded vista. “It’s very cold,” he says. “But beautiful.”

He spins the camera back around. Bartlett does have the vaguely rustic air of a man who has turned his back on civilisation. The 53-year-old is styled almost as you might a cartoon lumberjack: ungroomed beard, a red-and-black-plaid shirt under a green fleece. It’s the sort of look that served him well in his effusively received one-episode role in HBO’s post-apocalyptic thriller The Last of Us – playing a kind-hearted apocalypse survivor who falls in love with a sexually inexperienced Nick Offerman.

That was the latest in a run of prominent gay roles for Bartlett, who came out himself early in his career. He was already in his forties by the time he was cast as Dom, a world-weary late bloomer in Looking’s queer San Franciscan bohemia. By the time he found wider recognition – and an Emmy win – as the psychologically unspooling hotelier Armond in the first season of The White Lotus, Bartlett was 50. Amid this burgeoning fame, his bucolic home in Cape Cod, shared with his partner, has been a godsend. “But I’m not Brad Pitt,” he says. “I have a manageable level of notoriety. If I go into cities, I might get a few people saying they like my work. I’m never mobbed. But if you’re sort of on the edge of celebrity, like I probably am, I find it useful to be able to step into it, enjoy it, and then step away.”

Bartlett’s latest project is a theatrically released movie – the eccentric satire-thriller Opus. John Malkovich plays Alfred Moretti – not an Italian lager mascot, but a legendary Nineties pop star, who reappears after a three-decade absence to launch a new album, supposedly the greatest record of all time. Bartlett is Stan, the vain, regressive editor of a Rolling Stone-esque music magazine who attends the launch, alongside scrappy young journalist Ariel (the film’s lead, played by The Bear’s inimitable Ayo Edebiri). Visiting Moretti at his sinister, cult-like commune, Ariel, Stan and the rest of the invited guests soon find themselves trapped in a web of Moretti’s design.

“I think this film has a lot of interesting things to say about celebrity culture, and what happens when we get whipped up in it,” Bartlett says. Opus has shades of films such as The Menu (2022) and Blink Twice (2024) – genre-blurring eat-the-rich horrors that pit young everywoman protagonists against the schemes and dysfunctions of the upper class. The story is, says Bartlett, “a little elevated. We’re taking aspects of celebrity culture and turning it up a bit… Though it’s not necessarily that different from reality. I mean, the world is pretty insane.” He lets his voice scurry upwards into an ironic high register. “Particularly at the moment, let’s say.”

Bartlett is very much a supporting character within Opus: the film fixes most of its attention on Edebiri, a droll and winning ingénue, and Malkovich, allowed here to indulge his wackier impulses as the preening, esoteric pop star. But Bartlett is nonetheless very good in it, his character playing Ariel’s pigheaded foil, oblivious to the mounting danger. “I don’t know if he has any redeeming qualities,” he admits.

Stan was inspired by – among other figures – Jann Wenner, one of the creators of Rolling Stone magazine, who, in 2023, was condemned for his dismissive comments about Black and female artists. “He had this incredible trajectory, and then got into a lot of trouble towards the end of his career, in terms of things said that were – possibly, debatably, probably – extremely insensitive, at the very least,” says Bartlett.

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“There was an old-school boys’ club vibe about him. A sort of invincibility. You think you’re untouchable so you’re a little careless about what you do and say. I’m not necessarily saying this about him but people in that position – we see them in prominent positions in the US at the moment – it’s sort of like, ‘I can do whatever the hell I want’.” He pauses. “But let me just say,” he adds, a little apologetically, “I have a lot of respect and admiration for many, many journalists.”

What about his own relationship to celebrity culture? “Well, I live in the woods, Louis,” he says, dryly. “Does that answer your question?”

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There’s a sort of showman’s air to Bartlett, a playful canniness that's evident even over video. What can I say? The man knows how to hold court. He answers most of my questions in minutes-long monologues, always enthusiastic, never veering too far off-topic. I barely make a dent in my prepared questions – we don’t, for instance, get to talk about his childhood. Bartlett was born in Sidney and raised in Perth, and, after his parents separated, was raised by his loving and accepting mother. As a boy, he once knocked out several of his teeth, and, by the time new ones grew in, found he had developed a lisp. The subsequent speech therapy (“doing monologues, reading poetry”) sowed the seeds for his future.

When Bartlett first graduated from acting school around the age of 20, he was offered “long contracts” with a couple of Aussie soap operas (“I think it was Neighbours and Home and Away”). But the stigma around the genre put him off. “I looked down on it,” he said, “and I really regretted it later. Because I needed to build confidence – I didn't really have a lot of experience working with cameras. I was looking at it the wrong way, not really having an understanding of the industry and how it works – the value of different types of work.”

So in 2000, he left Oz for New York. “I’d come out of a prominent acting school, and made some kind of impression in the [Australian] industry. By the time I moved to New York, I really felt like I’d outgrown who I was. I was young and just needed to get a better sense of myself. Coming to New York, I could shed all that baggage – of who I was, or who I felt I was, or what was being projected onto me in Australia.”

He hesitates again, as if he feels the need to explain himself. “I love Australia,” he adds, “and I would love to work there more, to be honest – but it’s a different vibe. Because it’s smaller, people tend to be more protective about where they are in the industry. There’s a small group of roles for a big group of actors, and it can feel a bit hard to break in.”

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It wasn’t long before Bartlett got his first American breakthrough as a memorable guest star on the zeitgeist-straddling dramedy Sex and the City in 2002. But New York, he says, was “a tough city to survive in when you arrive with not much money. I think that was good for me. It makes you walk on fire a bit, test whether you’re willing to put in the time and energy. New York’s a place that draws in a lot of ambitious people – and people who didn’t fit, necessarily, in the place they come from. That city kind of blew my mind,” he muses. “It was incredible being in such a wonderful melting pot, culturally, artistically.”

In 2007, Bartlett was offered a role on another soap opera, CBS’s Guiding Light. This time, he leapt at it. “I was still feeling the same things – like other actors are gonna look down on me,” he recalls. “But I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. I wasn’t working very much; I had the time. The contract was a year, which turned into two, because of the writers’ strike. And I learned so much. I totally got over my fear of lines – because you have to learn so many lines that all sound the same. I earned good money. And I got a green card out of it.”

It wasn’t until 2014 that Bartlett starred in Looking, a series about three gay friends in San Francisco that was reductively billed at the time as the gay community’s answer to Girls. The two shows do share a certain awkward millennial cool, but Looking was always more grounded – and, by and large, more optimistic. Where Girls was rightly lauded by critics, Looking – brilliant on its own merits – was divisive. It was cancelled by HBO after just two seasons, with a conclusory movie produced to wrap up loose plot threads.

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“We were devastated at the time,” says Bartlett. “We loved that show so thoroughly… and were a bit shocked about the very mixed reactions – in the US particularly. We were in a bubble making the first season, just so committed to making something specific, and full of love, and real. And then it comes out and, you know, some people hate it.

“It was a beautiful thing in many ways,” he adds, bittersweetly. “We really wanted to keep going and we felt like we were just getting started. There was so much to explore. But you know, that's the way it goes.”

For Bartlett, at least, things ended up working out; after Looking’s cancellation, he bounced to the Netflix queer revival series Tales of the City, then on to The White Lotus for HBO. “I’m forever grateful to [The White Lotus creator] Mike White for taking a chance on me,” Bartlett says. “And you need that as an actor, because it’s easy to just get pigeonholed into the same sort of roles all the time. I didn’t have much visibility, and he had his choice of a lot of people… it’s so wonderful when someone sees something in you that you know is in yourself, but isn’t necessarily obvious.”

He smiles again, in a kind of mock-smugness. “I mean… I do feel like I did a pretty killer audition.”

And with that, we’re done. I close my laptop screen and head off into the concrete sprawl of north London. For Bartlett? The forest awaits.

‘Opus’ is in cinemas now