Christian Friedel has the range. Week to week on season three of The White Lotus, Friedel grants resort manager Fabian with a restless sense of order. He skulks around, as tense as a man in a tunic can be, shoulders sharp and uneasy. Compare that, perhaps, to Friedel’s turn in last year’s Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest, where he plays high-ranking Nazi officer Rudolf Höss with a cool, flippant menace. On The White Lotus, Fabian’s loose brown curls sit atop his tanned cherubic face; in The Zone of Interest, Höss is practically gray and wan, his hair cut close on the sides and slicked back on top. Viewers have tweeted praising Friedel, indulging the irony of him bouncing from a performance so dark to one so bluntly comedic, but with only one episode to go, is The White Lotus actually going to let him do anything?
What we know about Fabian is that his real passion is singing — a trait made convenient by Friedel’s real-life stage background and love for karaoke — but his multi-episode arc of working up the courage to sing in front of the hotel guests during dinner was cut short by the three blondes going at it about their decades-old grudges against each other, Fabian’s moment in the spotlight fading faster than Timothy Ratliff on lorazepam. The languid pace of this season and bevy of characters has pushed some — including Fabian — to the show’s sidelines. Friedel’s range is all well and good, but it feels strange that the show doesn’t seem to know what to do with his abilities.
In previous seasons of White Lotus, the hotel manager has always been a prominent and memorable player. In Hawaii, Murray Bartlett’s Armond went to war with one of his guests; in Sicily, Sabrina Impacciatore’s Valentina gave us the phrase “Peppa Pig” in an Italian accent. The resort managers at the various White Lotus locations share a tight fuse and superiority complex. Despite working in a position of power within the ecosystem of the hotel, they are still essentially subservient to all of their guests, if not significantly less well off. That uneasy tension plays into the show’s funniest (and darkest) moments, but we don’t even really have a sense of what Fabian makes of those who stay there beyond his ambient level of stress. The most interesting thing he’s been given so far is brushing off Belinda’s (valid) concerns about Greg-Gary in a very Fabian way. But is Greg-Gary paying him off? Or does he just not care about Belinda? With so little screentime, it’s hard to know.
With only a few days until the season’s end, fans are divided on where — if anywhere — Fabian’s subplot might be going. It’s possible that he’s a patsy, unaware of the swirling plots that have descended upon his resort, but that line of thinking feels almost too inactive, too passive for what Friedel’s given us so far. It’s also possible that he’s in cahoots with one of the resort’s less-than-savory non-guests, like Greg-Gary or Chloe or the Russians, but we’ve seen nothing that would suggest that over the course of the episodes that have aired so far. Mike White is usually a few steps ahead of his viewers, so Fabian’s story will likely go somewhere, even if it means that he’s the body floating in the water. Maybe he goes down defending his hotel from the Russian thieves? Or Gaitok hits him with a stray? Or, uh, he eats one of those suicide fruits because no one liked his performance?
Friedel is capable of just about any turn that Fabian might take in the show’s last hour, but having some direction would make Friedel’s turn from menacing face of fascism to woebegone middle manager all the more farcical. He can sell any turn, if only the show lets him go for it.