Filming for The White Lotus is underway at Hotel Martinez in Cannes, turning one of the city’s best-known luxury hotels into the setting for the show’s fourth season. Michel Cottray, a hotel executive, said the production was going to be gigantic.
The move puts the HBO series, which follows the lives of guests and staff at a fictional resort chain, back in a setting built to showcase wealth and status. Mike White has said season 4 is about fame, and that theme fits a hotel where celebrity has always been part of the scenery.
For Cottray, the show is not new territory. He said he had binged it with his wife after first knowing little about it a year ago, and added that he was now an expert on the storyline, even down to what happened in season two and in Taormina. His reaction reflects how closely the production ties into the hotel’s own image: high-end, watched and very much in view.
Hotel Martinez, built in 1929, sits a short walk from the Palais des Festivals and has long fed the Cannes Film Festival’s appetite for spectacle. Its blue-carpeted spiral staircase has shown up in many celebrity camera rolls, and Marie-Claire Boudaud said stars often use it just before the red carpet. She also said Mads Mikkelsen and Andie MacDowell are regulars, while Tom Cruise and Angelina Jolie have stayed there. Earlier festival guests have included Adrien Brody, Elle Fanning and Jane Fonda.
The hotel’s top-floor suite, with four bedrooms and four bathrooms, can run as high as €30,000 a night in peak season, a figure that captures the scale of the setting even before the cameras roll. La Palme d’Or, the hotel’s Michelin-starred restaurant, is also tied to the festival’s jury dinner, with a menu curated from the jury president’s filmography. This year’s jury president is Park Chan-wook, the first South Korean to hold the title.
What the production will actually make of the Martinez remains the open question. Staff are keeping quiet despite the high-profile HBO shoot, and the hotel’s role in the new season has not been spelled out. That silence only sharpens the appeal: the setting is doing a lot of the storytelling before a frame has been released.
For now, the key facts are clear enough. The White Lotus is back in Cannes, the Martinez is the stage, and the season’s obsession with fame has found a hotel where fame has never needed much help.
