The White Lotus Season 3 Episode 3 “The Meaning of Dreams” features the showdown fans of the HBO series have been waiting for ever since they realized that kindhearted Belinda Lindsey (Natasha Rothwell) and devious conman Greg Hunt (Jon Gries) were both hanging out at the Thailand resort.
**Spoilers for The White Lotus Season 3 Episode 3 “The Meaning of Dreams,” now streaming on MAX**
Yes, Belinda approaches Tanya’s (Jennifer Coolidge) ex-husband Greg this week on The White Lotus and it’s as tense an encounter as you were probably imagining. A simple public conversation in a hotel restaurant somehow feels cut out of a horror film. Sure, White Lotus composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s unnerving soundtrack helps ratchet up that tension, but series star Natasha Rothwell attributes it to Jon Gries’s chilling “approach to fear.”
The White Lotus first introduced both Belinda and Greg all the way back in Season 1. Belinda ran the spa at the White Lotus Hawaii and Greg was a guest. The two never met, though. Their sole connection is Tanya McQuoid. Before Tanya met Greg, she had been close with Belinda and promising to fund her dream of starting her own spa. After Greg swept Tanya off her feet, however, the heiress changed her mind on the business plan. Instead, she wed the “dying” Greg and wound up dead a year later.
The White Lotus Season 2 reveals that Greg is a conman who has arranged Tanya’s murder to inherit all of her fortune. Now, he’s conveniently holed up in Thailand with a much younger French Canadian girlfriend named Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon).
“I mean, our characters didn’t cross paths Season 1,” Natasha Rothwell told DECIDER. “So obviously I watched it, but we engaged off camera as friends. So I’d only ever experienced the lovely, warm, you know, just kind man that [Jon Gries] is.”
In The White Lotus Season 3 Episode 3, though, Belinda finally plucks up the courage to approach Greg to figure out how she knows him. She might not have met him in Season 1, but she definitely saw him with Tanya.
Belinda interrupts Greg’s dinner with girlfriend Chloe and new friends Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) and Rick (Walton Goggins) to get to the bottom of this. When she bluntly, but politely, asks Greg if she knows him, he deflects. He says in a chilling way that they’ve never met and that his name is Gary. However, the entire tone of the scene makes it explicit that he’s not only lying to her, but everyone knows he’s lying. They do know each other. (Duh.)
Rothwell revealed that Gries’s transformation into Greg had a palpable, physical affect on her and her performance.
“There’s like a shift that happens when he puts on Greg and looks at Belinda that just… My blood would run cold because you know that he has a potential for evil,” she said. “And it’s done with a smile, which is just so subtle, which is equally as terrifying.”
Rothwell went on to share that after recently watching screeners for future episodes, a specifically tense scene between Belinda and Greg actually had a physical effect on her!
“This is actually happened. I was watching Episodes 1 through 6 and I know what happens. I’m in the scene,” she said. “I jumped at home and I was just like, ‘This man has a hold on me.’”
“I think, you know, his approach to fear is really…yeah, it hits.”
Consider us all even more terrified of Greg than we were already.
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