It may have taken a couple of episodes, but The White Lotus fans are finally realizing where they recognize season three’s hotel manager from.
The awkward and deferential general manager, Fabian, is played by German actor Christian Friedel.
Before starring in the latest season of Mike White’s wildly popular eat-the-rich drama, Friedel notably played Rudolf Höss, commandant of the German Auschwitz concentration camp, in Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest.
The drama sees the Höss family enjoying the spoils of genocide from their idyllic home on the outskirts of the concentration camp.
In a tweet that’s been “liked” more than 16,000 times on X, one fan pointed out: “Watching White Lotus and floored myself realizing the goofy manager is the actor that played Rudolf Höss in The Zone of Interest.”
“I watched Zone of Interest leading into White Lotus tonight and would not have even guessed it was the same actor,” one person claimed in the replies.
In a recent interview with Variety, Friedel admitted he was excited to tackle more light-hearted material after the emotional toll Zone of Interest had taken on him.
“After the intense time of The Zone of Interest, I was searching for the opposite of that,” he said. “From the dark into the light, from a very serious character to a funny one. It was my first project where everything was in English, and that was a challenge and a gift, to do with such a great cast and crew and such a great director, Mike White.”
In an interview with The Independent last year, Friedel admitted the emotional shoot led him to have a panic attack on set. “But it didn’t matter if it was hard or not,” his co-star Sandra Hüller — who played his wife Hedwig Höss — said.
“I think we both felt when you’re there in this place, and the camp wall was literally 100 meters from the set… you have to put it into perspective. Nobody here brought any ego; nobody would want to ‘win’. It was really a completely personal struggle with this topic — for Jonathan and each of us, too.”
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“It was intense,” Friedel added. “Every day we went to work, we felt the responsibility.
“There’s something that Sandra sometimes said, very beautifully – ‘There are ghosts with us from the past.’ We felt this past, and never forgot what we were doing there.”
The White Lotus season three is airing on Max with episodes released weekly from February 16 to April 6.
