Patrick Schwarzenegger has revealed which actors inspired his The White Lotus character.
“I wanted to build something that was new and different but that stems from Mike’s writing. I watched some of the actors I look up to playing jock-assh*le roles,” Patrick said in an interview with Men’s Health.
“I loved what Bradley Cooper did in Wedding Crashers. It could have been very one-note, but it played very well,” he shared.
“Then there were elements of Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, who’s this really well-dressed, put-together guy—but there’s also something subtly off about him. I wanted people to have suspicions about Saxon, that something about him wasn’t clicking correctly,” he explained.
He continued: “That’s what Mike does so well: He wants the audience to believe that anybody and everybody is capable of being the killer or the victim. He wants you talking about it and guessing. And with Saxon, I wanted to mix together those elements of absurd, suspicious, funny, and crazy.”
Patrick also shared insight into how he portrayed the Saxon’s strut.
“He walks with bravado….I would walk, and Mike [White] would scream from over the camera, ‘Walk richer! You don’t look rich enough! Be more rich! Rich, rich, rich!’ This guy’s a character, and if I just walked how I would normally walk on the beach, it doesn’t play the same way as if I’m strutting like I’m on a catwalk. This guy is just so over the top,” he shared.
Patrick Schwarzenegger stars in The White Lotus season three alongside Jason Isaacs, Aimee Lou-Wood and more.
