The White Lotus was a huge hit for HBO this summer. The dark comedy was the talk of social media, as people really seemed to enjoy watching several groups of people have very weird vacations. You could argue, however, that no character had a weirder trip than Steve Zahn’s Mark.
Spoilers here if you haven’t seen the HBO show’s six-episode arc, but Zahn plays the husband of a very powerful tech CEO who was grappling with a number of issues while at the resort. Mark tries to bond with his son and learns a secret about his father that he spends the rest of the trip trying to unpack. That revelation came after he got a diagnosis about his genitals, which he worried may have been cancer.
One scene that got people talking came in the show’s first episode, where Zahn showed his aforementioned genitals to his wife, played by Connie Britton, to get her opinion on his potential medical issue. And now we know two important things about that scene: one, yes, the penis was a prosthetic; and two, also yes, Zahn got to pick it out himself. According to an interview with The Wrap, show creator Mike White actually gave Zahn the option to pick his own fake member before filming.
“I remember when I got the script asking Mike if I was going to have to do full frontal. And he’s like, ‘No, it’s going to be a prosthetic,’” Zahn told TheWrap. “I did have to approve the prosthetic that they used. He showed it to me first. And I was like, ‘Yeah, that’ll do.’”
He didn’t lobby for a more generous member? “No, I was like, ‘OK, great.’”
Zahn is predictably funny about the whole thing in the interview, admitting that he thought he was actually going to have to show off his real junk, not what ended up being somewhat swollen fake junk.
“I come from the old school where we were actually naked when we were naked,” Zahn said. “I mean, my ass is in so many movies and shows it’s not even funny.”
It’s good to know that Zahn was game for whatever White had in the script, even if it wasn’t necessary to reveal too much. And as we now know, somehow, given what went down at the end with Armond and the suitcase, that quick bit of full-frontal wasn’t even the most graphic thing that happened in the short series.
[via The Wrap]