Michel Cottray says The White Lotus is already changing the tempo at Hotel Martinez in Cannes. The general manager says the fourth season is underway at the Hyatt property, and the shoot is landing inside a hotel that lives in the public eye long before the cameras do.
“It’s going to be gigantic,” Cottray said of the filming. He had little knowledge of Mike White’s show a year before, but after bingeing it with his wife he said, “I’m an expert, you can ask me what happened in season two episode four, what happened in Taormina? I know”
Hotel Martinez on La Croisette
Built in 1929, Hotel Martinez sits a short walk from the Palais des Festivals site and carries the kind of address that makes a TV production feel bigger than a normal location shoot. Its blue-carpeted spiral staircase already functions like a stage: Marie-Claire Boudaud put it plainly, saying, “Just before the red carpet, we say, they use the blue carpet,” and adding, “You see all the celebrities with nice dresses here on the stairs, lots of photographers take pictures”
The setting is not just decorative. The hotel’s La Palme d’Or restaurant holds Cannes’ only Michelin star, and the top floor has a four-bedroom, four-bathroom suite that can cost up to €30,000 a night in peak season. For a series built around a fictional luxury global resort hotel chain, that kind of real-world pricing gives the production a ready-made shorthand for excess without a line of dialogue.
Cast and season four
Laura Dern and Steve Coogan will appear in the new season, while Vincent Cassel and Max Greenfield have been cast in it. Mike White told Entertainment Tonight that “Season 4 is about fame,” a theme that fits a hotel where visibility is part of the product and privacy is always conditional.
The hotel’s neighbors on Boulevard La Croisette include Prada, Jimmy Choo, Versace and Valentino, and its guest list has included Mads Mikkelsen and Andie MacDowell, along with Tom Cruise and Angelina Jolie. Those names matter less as gossip than as evidence of the hotel’s operating model: it already serves as a luxury showroom for Cannes, so The White Lotus is entering a place that is built to be watched.
What staff would not say
Staff at Hotel Martinez would not tell the reporter much about the filming even as production was already underway. That restraint leaves the main operational question hanging over the shoot: how much of the fourth season is being filmed there, and for how long, since the hotel has given no public timetable for the work.
For guests, the practical takeaway is simple enough. The hotel is absorbing a high-profile production inside a property defined by foot traffic, photographers, and awards-season optics, so the atmosphere around the blue staircase and the public spaces around La Croisette is part of the story now — not just the backdrop.
