Molly Shannon is Incredibly Evil in HBO’s ‘The White Lotus’

When Molly Shannon shows up in a show, it’s usually a good thing. The Saturday Night Live vet is a brilliant actress oozing with charm and wit. However her impromptu arrival in The White Lotus Episode 4 “Recentering” is horrific. Shannon plays Shane (Jake Lacy)’s wealthy mother, Kitty. She’s so obsessed with her boy that she surprises him and his bride Rachel (Alexandra Daddario) on their honeymoon. Molly Shannon’s White Lotus character may be the latest horrible human to show up in the HBO limited series, but might also be the most deliciously evil.

The White Lotus tells the story of one hellacious week at an exclusive island resort. We meet Armand (Murray Bartlett), the resort’s spiraling hotel manager, and Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), The White Lotus’s sweet spa manager, but most of the show is spent skewing the (mostly) wealthy guests. There’s a dysfunctional family vacationing, a grieving eccentric, and the young mismatched couple on their honeymoon. While Rachel and Shane seemed to be madly in love upon their arrival at The White Lotus, key class differences and personality clashes have started to bubble to the surface. The exceptionally shallow Shane comes from money and is more obsessed with proving that Murray cheated him and his family out of the “real” honeymoon suite than he is with Rachel’s happiness.

Rachel, for her part, is a young woman adrift in doubt. She has a poor-paying job as a journalist writing aggregated posts for websites, but she loves her job. Shane doesn’t understand her need for a career. By the time his mother crashes their honeymoon, he’s convinced Rachel to put writing on the back burner, but she still wants a job. It’s a point that confuses Molly Shannon’s Kitty, who doesn’t see the point in putting effort into anything that’s not immediately lucrative.

But that’s not simply what makes Molly Shannon’s character so deliciously villainous. Her antiquated views and snobbery are just part of a larger venomous soul. First of all, the audacity to crash your own child’s honeymoon shows a level of egotism and lack of propriety that is mind-boggling. Kitty tries to play it off by saying their wedding was stressful for her and she’s only there for a short time before joining a friend at a different resort. But it’s soon obvious that the woman is oblivious to anyone outside her tight, familial circle. She claims she doesn’t even remember the wedding, but can crack that Rachel made a “pale” bride. She only gives compliments to smooth the way for a worse insult. It’s obvious where Shane gets his own shallowness from.

It’s not even that she dislikes Rachel. Worse, she discounts her. Even as Rachel explains that she wants a job, Kitty refuses to hear. She, and Shane, know Rachel better than even Rachel does. It’s infantilizing. Worse, it shows us how little Kitty thinks of her own daughter-in-law. If this is how she treats the woman her son has married, then how does she behave around others?

The White Lotus is a deliciously savage class satire where barely any characters emerge from writer/director Mike White’s spotlight unscathed. But Kitty feels especially awful. She’s rude, classist, patronizing, selfish, and borderline sociopathic in her lack of empathy. Maybe she’s not all that worse than the cruel Olivia (Sydney Sweeney) or chaotic Armand, but she feels like something wholly sinister. Perhaps that’s simply down to casting. Molly Shannon is great at playing characters who behave outside of norms, but there’s usually an inherent sweetness to them. Here, a performer who usually radiates kindness is the epitome of cruel.

Molly Shannon’s entrance on The White Lotus is a chaotic villain turn, and we love to hate it.

Where to stream The White Lotus