‘The White Lotus’ Episode 2 Had A Surprise Star Cameo You Couldn’t See

The White Lotus picked up steam yesterday with (spoilers) an intense robbery, its first sex scene and even more Ratliff family weirdness. But one aspect was more fun than others, a surprise cameo from an Oscar-winning actor who…you could not actually see.

That would be the voice of Kenny Nguyen, the man that Timothy Ratliff has been trying to get on the phone since last episode as the press begins to call him about a big scandal. He finally got a hold of Kenny, who was freaking out and letting Ratliff know that he was exposed in some sort of money laundering scandal that they did a while back, given that the FBI had now raided Kenny’s office.

Kenny was voiced by Ke Huy Quan, who won an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once, and has had a load of roles since then in projects like American Born Chinese, Kung Fu Panda, Loki and his own action movie, Love Hurts. I definitely thought I recognized his voice over the phone, and double-checking, yes, it is him. Quan posted “I guess the secret is out!” on Instagram, though I would love to read about how this came together in the first place.

It’s unclear if Quan will return to the show in terms of more calls (he threatens to kill himself, and Ratliff tells him to do it), though there’s no way he’s going to show up in person, I imagine, given that Ratliff is halfway around the world.

Ratliff is hugely wealthy, possibly a billionaire traveling with his own private security force (I imagine some of the gunshots we heard in the premiere come from them), and he laments that he’s in trouble for a deal that “only” made him $10 million, and he shouldn’t have done it in the first place.

Of course, the Ratliff family knows none of this with his wife busy taking pills and his children sexually harassing each other. The theory there is that Saxon is actually a step-brother, the wife’s son from a previous marriage, while the other two kids are Timothy Ratliff’s, though his behavior is certainly still pretty weird, of course.

In trailers for future episodes we have seen Ratliff ask his wife what they’d do if all their wealth went away, something she can’t seem to fathom even as a hypothetical, and it seems unlikely that Ratliff will avoid consequences for this. I just looked up Thailand’s extradition rules, and yes, you can be extradited from that country to the US for crimes, so hiding out there indefinitely may not be an option. We’ll see where all this goes over the course of the rest of the season.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.