Duke & UNC star in Season 3 of HBO’s ‘White Lotus.’ Here are ties and theories
The newest season of “The White Lotus” may be set in Thailand, but some of the main characters have a big connection to North Carolina.
Similar to the first season in Hawaii and the second set in Sicily, the third installment of the hit drama series on HBO follows a group of guests and employees at an exclusive, upscale resort.
But this time, it features a family of five from North Carolina full of love for rivals Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill — with plenty of Southern references sprinkled throughout the storyline in the very first episode.
Even though the state has gotten plenty of screen time lately with “The Bachelor,” “Love is Blind,” “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” “The Staircase” (HBO) and other popular shows, fans were shocked and pretty stoked to spot the Tar Heel ties in the latest season.
From the premiere, it seems unlikely that this will be the last time we hear about the Triangle rivals at the famous and fictitious White Lotus property.
Spoiler alert: Here’s a guide to all of the times Duke, UNC and North Carolina have been mentioned in Season 3 so far. We’ll continue to update this story all season.
UNC references in ‘The White Lotus’ Season 3
Episode 1: Upon their arrival at the luxury spa and wellness sanctuary, the Ratliff family talk about how they found The White Lotus thanks to their daughter, Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), a UNC senior majoring in religious studies.
A true house divided — her mother Victoria (Parker Posey) was also a Tar Heel grad and her father, Timothy (Jason Isaacs), and brother, Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), both graduated from Duke. Her youngest high school brother, Lochlan (Sam Nivola), got accepted into both.
At dinner, when he mentioned he had a big decision to make, both of his parents were rooting for their alma maters to be his pick.
Though the fictitious family never specifically says where in North Carolina they’re from, Isaacs said in a previous interview that he pulled his Southern accent from those in Durham.
“Well the Southern accent is a generalized wash. I had to do Durham, North Carolina, which is very specific,” he said. “It sounds a lot like the other Southern accents but it’s got two vowels in it that sound like the upper class English. So it is weird because nobody listening is used to it. Only the people who live locally.”
How accurate are the Duke and UNC references in the show?
There appear to be some inconsistencies in the show’s timeline when it comes to college admissions, decisions and final exams, which are all mentioned in the first episode.
First, let’s situate what time of year this season’s trip to the White Lotus is taking place.
We get a clue near the end of the episode, when Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) talks to her son, Zion (Nicholas Duvernay), on the phone. He tells her that he had a microeconomics final exam on the day she’s calling, followed by a statistics exam on Wednesday.
With college finals usually taking place in mid-December for the fall semester, or late April to early May for the spring semester, that gives us two options.
But we also know Lochlan has “just” been accepted to Duke and UNC, per the introduction his mom gives to the White Lotus staff when they first arrive at the resort.
This is where it gets a bit … inaccurate, by our calculations. That, or Lochlan is cutting it really close with his decision about where to go to school.
In real life, Duke offers two types of admission: early decision and regular decision. Early decision is binding, which means students must enroll at the university if they are accepted. Duke generally releases those decisions in mid-December.
Because Lochlan is trying to decide which school to attend, meaning he has a choice in the matter and is not bound to go to Duke, it’s clear he did not apply to Duke as an early-decision applicant. That means he must have applied by the regular-decision deadline, which means he would not find out the status of his application until late March or early April.
When applying to UNC, Lachlan would have a choice of doing so by an early — but not binding — deadline or a regular deadline. If he applied early, he would find out the status of his application by late January, while a regular-decision notification would come by late March.
Take all of that, plus Zion being in the middle of taking exams, and it’s likely that this season is taking place in the spring.
But, is it feasible for Zion’s college exams to be going on while Lochlan is still weighing his decision?
Maybe. But he’d be pressed for time, as most colleges — including UNC and Duke — generally require students to decide where they will enroll, and pay a deposit, by May 1.
We don’t know where Zion is enrolled in college. But, for the sake of continuity, let’s use UNC as an example.
The earliest spring-semester exam scheduled at UNC this year is on April 30 — meaning that, if Belinda’s son is taking exams at a similar time, that would give Lachlan just one day to decide whether he’s going to UNC or Duke.
Possible? Sure. Likely? The jury’s still out.
(And, let’s be honest, no one else cares about this discrepancy as much as we do, probably.)
Apart from UNC and Duke, another unmistakable NC tie
We can’t let this go without mentioning Michael Peterson.
As many know, Peterson was found guilty of murdering his wife, Kathleen Peterson, after she was found dead at the bottom of a back staircase in their Durham home in December 2001. After his conviction, Peterson was granted a new trial and released from prison in 2011.
The Peterson case was the subject of an award-winning documentary series now airing on Netflix and an Emmy-nominated HBO drama series — both series are called “The Staircase.”
In the HBO version of “The Staircase,” Parker Posey played Durham assistant district attorney Freda Black. Patrick Schwarzenegger, playing Posey’s character’s son on “White Lotus,” played Peterson’s son, Todd Peterson. Also, the two young women Mike Peterson was raising after the deaths of both parents, were Martha and Margaret Ratliff, the same name as the family visiting The White Lotus resort.
What else did we miss?
How to watch ‘The White Lotus’
Season 3 of “The White Lotus” is now streaming on HBO Max with new episodes released every Sunday at 9 p.m.
Editor’s Note: This story has been edited to include Isaacs’ interview about his accent being connected to Durham, N.C.
This story was originally published February 19, 2025 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Duke & UNC star in Season 3 of HBO’s ‘White Lotus.’ Here are ties and theories."
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