Why Victoria Ratliff From White Lotus Season 3 Looks So Familiar

The highly anticipated third season of HBO's critically acclaimed comedy "The White Lotus" debuted in February 2025, and it was certainly worth the wait. Following seasons set in Hawaii and Sicily, the new season follows a fresh cast of characters as they check into a White Lotus resort in Thailand. Among the new hotel guests are Timothy and Victoria Ratliff, a privileged, ridiculously wealthy couple played by, respectively, "Harry Potter" alum Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey. A pill-popping, narcissistic Southerner, Victoria is the mother of three grown children: finance bro in the making Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), wannabe Buddhist Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), and still-finding-himself Lochlan (Sam Nivola).

"It was so fun to play," Posey told Variety of diving into such a juicy role. "It's the theatricality of Southerners. I'm from the South so I was so happy to bring that Tennessee Williams kind of drama, 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.' It's just that lady. It was a blast."

Over the course of an acting career that began in the early 1990s, Posey has been an indie-film darling, a member of Christopher Guest's repertory ensemble, and, thanks to her latest role, is experiencing a career renaissance that's been long overdue. To find out more, read on to discover why Victoria Ratliff from "The White Lotus" Season 3 looks so familiar.

Parker Posey was just 18 years old when she moved to New York to study drama at SUNY Purchase. She never did graduate, dropping out in her senior year when she was cast as Tess Shelby in daytime soap "As the World Turns." Appearing in the show in 1991 and 1992, Posey delivered a memorable performance as a teenager from the South who was pretending to be pregnant. 

As Posey explained in an interview with Index Magazine, she was taken by surprise when she was offered the role. "I just went in to audition for 'As the World Turns' because it was a free ride into the city. I had no idea that I would actually get the job," she recalled.

Like many stars who got their start on soap operas, Posey considered the year and four months she spent on "As the World Turns" to be something of an acting boot camp. "It's the hardest work I've ever done in my life," she said of acting on a soap. "It's melodrama. It's a different style of acting that ... normal people don't act that way. I like soap opera acting. If it's done really well, there's nothing better. It's old school. It's like what those melodramas in the '30s and '40s were like."

It's fair to say that few films have launched more stars than "Dazed and Confused." Released in 1993, director Richard Linklater's homage to being a teenager in the 1970s boasted a who's who of future movie stars, a lengthy list that included "Bridget Jones" star Renée Zellweger, Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Cole Hauser, Milla Jovovich, and, of course Parker Posey. Posey is at the center of a brief yet memorable scene, playing a sadistic high school senior hazing the junior girls. 

Looking back on that seminal experience, Posey recalled a set full of aspiring young peers, with a distinct lack of competitive edge. "It was so open. You could go up to actors; that was really great," she told The Wrap in 2018. "It just felt like a kinship there. There weren't a lot of egos, no 'this is my power play, we're going to turn it around here on camera.'"

Her first foray into feature film, "Dazed and Confused" was also unlike anything she would experience in the future. "It was so independent, so free," Posey recalled. "You could dance like no one was watching. There was a freedom there. It was such a different time. And it was 25 years ago."

In 1993, Parker Posey was cast in "Tales of the City," the acclaimed, groundbreaking TV miniseries adapted from Armistead Maupin's novels. Playing Connie Bradshaw, high school friend of series protagonist Mary Ann Singelton (Laura Linney), Posey reprised the role in the 1998 followup, "More Tales of the City," and again in 2001's "Further Tales of the City." 

"I played a young woman who was sleeping around, had a big heart, turned to some bad relationship with a real player, right?" Posey said when reminiscing about her role with the A.V. Club. "And you know, she danced a lot." 

Interviewed in 2015 for The Binge, Posey revealed that "Tales of the City" remains one of the projects that people continue to associate with her, despite all the years that had passed. "'Tales of the City' is another one people talk to me about!" she said. Asked to share her remembrances of working on the show, she gushed, "Oh my god, pure joy. I love Armistead Maupin and Laura Linney. Being a part of that was the beginning, it was one of my first jobs. I just loved it."

In the mid-1990s, Parker Posey began starring in a string of independent films, including "The Doom Generation," "Party Girl," "Flirt," "Kicking and Screaming," "SubUrbia," and others. So prevalent was she in that world that, in 1997, Time dubbed her "queen of the indies," a label that wound up becoming something of an albatross around her neck in the decades that followed. Meanwhile, she also found herself struggling to cope with the fame that accompanied the success she was experiencing with her acting career. "Fame was an adjustment," she told Interview. "I had no reference point for it." 

While her status as indie queen should have paved the way for studio stardom, it didn't work out that way. "I'm trying to work in studio movies, but they won't hire me. I get feedback from my agent saying, 'She's too much of an indie queen,'" she explained in an interview with IndieWire. 

As a profile in The New York Times Magazine observed, Time's declaration, which should have marked the beginning of a successful new chapter, was actually the beginning of a period of career struggles for her. According to the Times, when an interviewer once pointed out that she'd carved out a niche, she ruefully responded, "The niche has carved me." 

In 1996, at the height of her indie-queen reign, Parker Posey was cast in "Waiting for Guffman," an improvised mockumentary set in the world of small-town community theater. Directed by Christopher Guest — who also played bonkers director Corky St. Clair — the film was a hit with critics and audiences alike, and Guest would reunite the core cast (which also included the unshakable duo of Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara) for several more comedies in the years that followed. Posey played Libby Mae Brown, who worked at the local Dairy Queen when not pursuing her theatrical aspirations. Writing in her memoir, "You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir," Posey recalled being initially terrified of having to improvise all her character's dialogue — and then heartbroken when filming was over. "I was very sad the last day of the shoot, because I'd never see Corky again," she wrote, via an excerpt appearing in Vulture. "I cried in the van and Chris held my hand."

She would reunite with Guest and her co-stars for several more improvised comedies: "Best in Show," released in 2000; 2003 folk-music spoof "A Mighty Wind;" and, in 2006, "For Your Consideration." She collaborated with Guest one more time in "Mascots," his 2016 Netflix comedy series.

Despite her experience in all those improvised comedies, she remained unconvinced of her own abilities within that milieu. "I still don't think I'm actually good at it," she told The Guardian. "It's like a f***ing miracle when I finish a scene."

By the latter part of the 1990s, Parker Posey entered the next stage of her career. While she'd previously headlined small indie flicks, she began being cast in supporting parts in larger studio movies. That was the case in 1998, when she co-starred with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in "You've Got Mail," the highly anticipated rom-com reuniting the stars of mega-hit "Sleepless in Seattle." 

"Yeah, she's a bit much," Posey told interviewer Bobby Wygant of her "You've Got Mail" character, Patricia Eden, an uptight and ruthlessly ambitious book editor who's the girlfriend of Hanks' character. The film proved to be a giant hit, bringing in a quarter-billion at the box office. Yet for Posey, "You've Got Mail" marked the beginning of the period in her career that she described to The Guardian as "little parts in big films."

As she told IndieWire, the early 2000s was a period characterized by frustration over roles she knew she could nail, but wound up going to other women. "I wasn't really getting offered anything good," she said. "I would audition for all these great parts that ended up going to bigger names like Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock." She reiterated those career struggles in a 2015 interview with The New York Times. "Hollywood just doesn't know what to do with me," she complained. "And it's not for lack of trying." 

Parker Posey's next small role in a big film came in 2000's "Scream 3," portraying Jennifer Jolie. In the somewhat meta plot, Posey's character was an actor playing Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) in a movie called "Stab," a fictional retelling of the events of the previous films. Sadly, her character met a grisly fate at the hands of Ghostface, the murderous maniac at the center of the horror franchise from director Wes Craven. 

"That was really fun," she told Comicbook.com in 2023 of her experience on "Scream 3." "I can't believe Wes Craven let me get away with some of the silly stuff I was doing. I loved him, and that was fun." 

In that interview, she also admitted she'd be up to returning to the franchise — despite the fact that her character had long since been killed off. According to Posey, she'd had the opportunity to speak with "Scream" producers recently, and shared her idea. "And I actually pitched, 'Can I just be in another dimension and come back? And continue to ...' I hope so. I would love to do that," she added.

After kicking off the 2000s with "Scream 3," Parker Posey then played a nefarious record company executive in "Josie and the Pussycats" before joining "Blade: Trinity." In the third film in Wesley Snipes' "Blade" franchise, Posey played a vicious vampire. "I wanted Danica to be annoyed, kind of punky and sort of over the whole 'living forever' thing ... she's very blasé about the whole thing. Life doesn't matter at all to her now," Posey told the Seattle Times of the approach she took to her character, powerful vampire CEO Danica Talos. As Parker conceded, playing a vampire was certainly a change of pace for her. "Usually I don't get cast in horror things like this," she added. "But who knows, maybe this'll start a trend, and when I'm old I'll do my own 'Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?'"

Unfortunately for Parker, "Blade: Trinity" was beset with behind-the-scenes drama, most of which reportedly emanated from star Wesley Snipes. As SlashFilm reported, Spin writer Chris Parry was dispatched to the set for a story that never saw the light of day due to all the on-set shenanigans. However, he did speak with Posey, who summed up how the rest of the cast was feeling about the film's star. "I came here to do something fun and stupid and big budget and I don't normally get to do that kind of thing," Posey said. "Don't have the boobs for it, you know? So I'm just showing up, saying my lines, having fun with it. And Wesley isn't."

Two years after "Blade: Trinity," Parker Posey was cast in "Superman Returns," which introduced actor Brandon Routh in his sole big-screen outing as the Man of Steel. In the 2006 film, Posey played Kitty Kowalski, abrasive girlfriend of supervillain Lex Luthor, portrayed by Kevin Spacey. As Posey explained during a press junket, she was a neophyte in the world of comic book movies, and was taken aback when she was cast in the role — but not allowed to see the top-secret script. "They said, no, you have to say yes without reading it, which was like, wow," she said. 

When she finally did read the script, she was heartened by the way her character was written, particularly her relationship with Lex. "She's just as smart as he is if not maybe smarter," Posey told Comic Book Resources. "Although, she doesn't release her cards which are really close to her chest. That's where the humor is. She says something really obvious that might sound a little dumb, but she's actually correct and he's an ego maniac."

The same year that "Superman Returns" was released, Parker Posey had dipped her toe in television, guest-starring roles in several episodes of "Boston Legal." In 2008, she took on a starring role in television for the first time, appearing alongside "Six Feet Under" alum Lauren Ambrose in "The Return of Jezebel James." The sitcom, which aired on the Fox network, had an impressive pedigree, produced by "Gilmore Girls" creator Amy Sherman-Palladino (who would go on to create acclaimed comedy "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel"). Posey played Sarah, an editor of children's books, who enlists her younger sister to carry a baby for her when she learns she's unable to have children.

As Posey said in an interview with Out, she'd read the pilot script while shooting a movie in and loved what she read. "I was laughing, and I was really moved by the end," she said. "I like Sarah. She's very frenzied and accident-prone, and I like playing people who don't really know what's wrong with them, who aren't self-aware."

While Posey may have loved the story, that was not the general consensus of the American viewing public; to say the series was not well received is an understatement. "The Return of Jezebel James" was cancelled after just two episodes aired, with the network pointing to abysmal reviews and ratings that were deemed to be unacceptably low.

After the cancellation of "Jezebel James," Parker Posey appeared in both film and television; in the latter, she made memorable guest-starring appearances on "Parks and Recreation," "The Big C," "New Girl," "The Good Wife," "Louie," and "Portlandia." On the big screen, she appeared in "Cafe Society" and "Irrational Man," both directed by Woody Allen, whose personal life has been controversial to say the least.

Her next role as a television series regular came in 2018 with Netflix's "Lost in Space." In the remake of the classic 1960s series, she played devious Dr. Smith, a character she'd come to love when watching the original series when she was a kid. As she recalled in an interview for Den of Geek, she was surprised — albeit pleasantly so — to be offered the part. "I was like, 'What? Are you serious?' It was shocking to me," she said. "I loved this character, Dr. Smith. He seemed so unique."

Speaking with IndieWire, Posey admitted she was thrilled to be part of a project that she felt emanated positivity. "It's cool that Netflix has made something that's so big in scope, and I hope it fills up people's homes and gives them lots of good energy," she said. "It has a lot of heart and it's emotional and I think that's really cool."

After "Lost in Space" ended its three-season run in 2021, Parker Posey starred in HBO's true crime series "The Staircase," appeared in an episode of "Tales of the Walking Dead," and guest-starred in the espionage rom-com "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." She also appeared in some films, including "Beau is Afraid" and "Thelma."

All of which led to the third installment of "The White Lotus." When the season premiered, Posey was heaped with praise for her performance as Victoria Ratliff. She's having a major moment, not unlike "Legally Blonde" actor Jennifer Coolidge, who played Tanya McQuoid in the first two seasons.

Taking on a character who lives in her own little bubble of privilege, oblivious to the world around her, presented Posey with some extraordinary opportunities. "Victoria, is she in Taiwan or Thailand? She doesn't know," Posey told Bustle. Posey, who'd worked with Coolidge in several of Christopher Guest's projects, revealed an idea she came up with for Season 4 of "The White Lotus" that would allow them to share the screen — despite Tanya's murder in the second series. Posey, however, felt that could be circumvented by setting the White Lotus hotel in the Swiss Alps. "When you reach a certain altitude, you start to hallucinate, and it's a very spiritual thing," she said, recounting a friend's story of seeing a woman who gave him a piece of chocolate, only to realize he was imagining the woman. "So, I think Jennifer Coolidge should play that part," she said. "Can you see it?"