Patrick Schwarzenegger is a nepo baby I can endorse

In The White Lotus, he defied expectations by bringing depth to an entitled creep

Here is a sentence I never expected to write: Arnold Schwarzenneger’s son just delivered one of the most moving TV performances of the year in The White Lotus.

Weird, right?

Courtesy of Fabio Lavino/HBO

The latest installment of the scathing social satire/murder mystery follows the privileged guests at a lush wellness resort in Thailand over the course of a life-altering week. It brought all the things we’ve come to expect of Mike White’s anthology series: meme-worthy facial expressions, unhinged monologues, transgressive sex scenes, breakthrough performances by actors you probably didn’t know before but now want to see in everything; beautiful scenery; rich people behaving badly yet somehow making you care about them.

Yet Season 3, which concluded Sunday night, has left fans divided: Depending on whom you ask, the finale was either too slow or too rushed, too predictable or too chaotic, beautifully tragic or just…absurd.

Whether Season 3 was the best or the worst one yet is subjective. But if there is one thing most viewers can agree on, it’s that Schwarzenegger brought surprising depth and humanity to his role as Saxon Ratlif, an entitled North Carolina finance bro whose family vacation to Thailand sends the sex-obsessed Duke graduate on an unexpected journey of enlightenment.

In the world of The White Lotus, characters rarely change for the better, but by the end of this season, Saxon had somehow transformed from a less charming version of Patrick Bateman into the show’s most sympathetic character—someone who, like most of the audience, had fallen completely in love with the doomed Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood). That look he gave Chelsea as she leapt into the arms of Rick (Walton Goggins), the gruff, older boyfriend who would get her killed a few hours later? It’s the stuff GIFS—and Emmys—are made of.

Courtesy of Fabio Lavino/HBO

Saxon’s arc was all the more compelling because of how, consciously or not, it played with Schwarzenegger’s status as Hollywood and political royalty. He is, of course, the eldest son of Arnold, the famed bodybuilder, action star, and California governor; and Maria Shriver, distinguished TV journalist and prominent member of the Kennedy family. Like his character in The White Lotus—a son of privilege who revealed surprising emotional depth—Schwarzenegger proved himself to be a nepo baby with more to offer than a famous last name.

Understandably, given the class divide in this country, there is a reflexive tendency to be skeptical of nepo-babies, especially in showbiz, even though they’ve been part of the industry since before Liza Minnelli was in diapers. But in recent years, it seems a whole generation of famous offspring have taken over the industry. Everywhere you look, especially in premium TV or Oscar-baiting movies, there are people like Dakota Johnson, Zoë Kravitz, Maya Hawke, Bryce Dallas Howard, and John David Washington.

The term took off thanks to a 2022 New York magazine cover story that triggered a lively, sometimes vicious nepo-baby discourse: Why was the industry so bad at finding new talent? Shouldn’t Hollywood, with its supposed liberal values, be a place that fosters meritocracy? Then again, what’s so bad about getting into the family business? Doctors and plumbers do it all the time. Should we judge anyone based on who their parents are? And why do nepo babies in entertainment bother us so much?

HBO, home of The White Lotus, was arguably ground zero for the current nepo baby epidemic. It all began in 2012 with the premiere of Girls, the zeitgeisty comedy following four twenty-something women in Brooklyn played by actors who all happened to be the daughters of prominent people in the arts and media. Along with countless hot takes about its depictions of sex and dating, the show set off a conversation about generational privilege in showbiz. Nepo babies have popped up on numerous HBO shows including The Idol (starring Lily-Rose Depp, daughter of Johnny), Euphoria (starring Maude Apatow, daughter of Judd), and The Gilded Age (starring Louisa Jacobson, daughter of Meryl Streep).

The stigma has become so intense that anyone perceived as a nepo baby needs to have a good answer prepared for the inevitable questions about their privilege. Ben Platt, the Dear Evan Hansen star whose dad is theater and film producer Marc Platt, learned this the hard way after an awkward interview with Rolling Stone in 2023 in which his publicist intervened to shut down the nepo-baby question entirely.

Jack Quaid—son of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan and star of the satirical superhero series The Boys—was much more graceful when he told The Daily Beast, “I knew the door was open for me in a lot of ways that it’s just not for a lot of actors, and I’ve just tried to work as hard as I possibly can to prove that I deserve to walk through that door.”

Schwarzenegger’s parents both sweetly celebrated his star-making turn on social media—Shriver with an Instagram post touting her new book, supposedly titled I am Patrick’s Mother.

But he has not completely avoided the nepo-baby backlash. He caught some flak for complaining, in an interview with the Sunday Times, about people who think he only got the part because of his family background. “They’re not seeing that I’ve had 10 years of acting classes, put on school plays every week, worked on my characters for hours on end, or the hundreds of rejected auditions I’ve been on,” he said, adding, “I’m very fortunate to have the life and family that I have.”

But his funny, tender performance in The White Lotus—and his ability to make such a dramatic character arc convincing—should be enough to silence the naysayers. The role also cleverly leveraged the low expectations viewers have when it comes to nepo babies. Most fans immediately loathed his character, and probably thought it fitting that such a shallow jerk was played by the son of a musclebound movie star whose crowning achievement as an actor was the line “It’s not a toomah” in Kindergarten Cop.

Saxon’s name—taken from the ancient Germanic people known for their conquest of Britain—offers a hint of his personality. (Elon Musk also as a son named Saxon. Make of this what you will.) When he first arrives at the White Lotus, Saxon is only interested in getting laid, crushing it at the gym, and making protein smoothies. He is fixated with sex to a disturbing degree, asking his meek teenage brother about his porn preferences and mocking his sister for being a virgin despite being “hot.” Saxon worships his father, Timothy (Jason Isaacs), a businessman from a prominent Southern family (we learn his grandfather was governor of North Carolina). What Saxon doesn’t know is that his father is under investigation for financial crimes and will probably be arrested as soon as he returns home.

For most of the season, Saxon was the leading contender for Most Hated Character, the latest and most obnoxious in a string of toxic white males to populate The White Lotus cinematic universe. But strangely enough, the character grows more likable after an incestuous threesome with his little brother Lochlan—yet another sentence I never expected to write. (Incidentally, Lochlan is played by another nepo baby, Sam Nivola, son of Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola.)

The encounter—coupled with rejection from Chelsea, who tells Saxon he is “soulless” and later, spooked by their obvious chemistry, gives him a stack of books by Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön to read—forces Saxon to do some soul-searching. He finds the clarity to not only turn down a request from the gorgeous Chloe (Charlotte LeBon) for a kinky sexual favor he surely would have obliged days earlier, he also confronts his dad about his bizarre behavior.

“I will always be seen by everyone as Timothy Ratlif’s son. And I’m ok with that. I am. As long as everything at work is going good. And everything at work is going good, right?” he asks Timothy in the penultimate episode, “Killer Instincts.”

“I don’t have anything else but this. I don’t have any interests, I don’t have any hobbies. If I’m not a success, I’m nothing. And I can’t handle being nothing. I’ve put my whole life into this basket, into your basket.”

Thankfully, Schwarzenegger—the younger—doesn’t have to worry about that.

Meredith Blake is the Culture Columnist for The Contrarian.