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Patrick Schwarzenegger really put it all out there in his audition for The White Lotus season 3.
The 31-year-old plays the oldest child of the Ratliff family, Saxon, in the latest season of the Mike White hit series, and he revealed during a March 13 interview on The Kelly Clarkson Show that his brother-in-law Chris Pratt played a role in helping him land the part.
When guest host Molly Sims asked if it was true that Schwarzenegger had to “make love to the camera with [his] eyes” in his audition, he said that her wording made it sound “so weird” before sharing what really happened.
“My brother-in-law actually told me [that] when you’re auditioning, that in the first couple seconds. the casting director or the director will kind of know if you’re right for the role — and [that I should] try to do something unique,” Schwarzenegger said.
“So for the first five or 10 seconds before the scene started, I just kind of locked in and had a little romantic moment with the camera.”
He joked that Pratt, who is married to the Gen V actor’s sister Katherine Schwarzenegger, “knows a thing or two” about auditions and he continued to elaborate on how he made himself stand out in his.
“It’s not the appropriate wording for television,” he admitted. “I just kind of eyed the camera and was looking it up and down and kind of having its moment and they thought it was really awkward and creepy and fun and it was just perfect for the character.”
He also praised his costar Jason Isaacs, who plays his dad on the show, as “fantastic” as he raved about the whole team behind the show. “That’s one of the benefits of getting to do a show like this — besides getting to stay in Thailand for seven months on the beach and work with Mike White — is you get to work with incredible actors and actresses.”
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Schwarzenegger told PEOPLE of the audition process for the highly coveted series, “They don’t want to give anybody information. So you kind of just have to go off of the audition papers [and think], what are they looking for? What do you want to bring to this character? Honestly, it was just me taking a wild stab at what [Mike White] was looking for.”
When he found out he’d landed the role, he said, “I started crying and it was the greatest day in history for me.”
His family was equally emotional. “Obviously, I’m going to tell my fiancée [Abby Champion] because we got engaged the week before and I was like, ‘Sorry, I’m leaving for seven months [to film].’ So that was perfect timing. Then I went and had lunch with my whole family the week later, and I told them and my mom started bursting out, crying.”
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“Then my sister started crying, and then I started crying, and then Abby started. It was like a domino effect of mayhem and tears,” he recalled.
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New episodes of The White Lotus season 3 air Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on Max.