About That Surprise Cameo in the The White Lotus Season 3 Premiere

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the first episode of The White Lotus Season 3.

Who would’ve thought that the character who’d make the biggest splash in the Season 3 premiere of HBO’s The White Lotus would appear on screen for a few seconds, roughly three-quarters of the way through the episode, and never say a word? Jon Gries absolutely deserves the millions of gasps his unannounced return, as the late Tanya McQuoid’s (Jennifer Coolidge) diabolical widower Greg Hunt, on Sunday surely evoked. But maybe we shouldn’t be so shocked to see him again. He does, after all, have plenty of unfinished business.

Although he now has the distinction of being the only character to appear in all three seasons of the show, Greg remains an enigma. He showed up late in Season 1 and checked out early in Season 2, as his old pal, possible lover, and apparent co-conspirator Quentin (Tom Hollander) did the dirty work of leading Tanya to a watery grave. Now Quentin and his merry band of murderous gays are dead by her hand, presumably leaving Greg to enjoy an undivided inheritance of $500 million. I would argue that his persistence on the show makes him one of its most important characters, and perhaps the most important. The outcome of his story—that of a man widely considered to be Lotus’ supervillain—is going to be crucial to understanding creator Mike White’s overarching ideas about wealth, love, death, and other major themes.

We catch our first glimpse of Greg a full 48 minutes into the premiere of the new, Thailand-set season. A gorgeous young woman sits down next to Aimee Lou Wood’s Chelsea at the bar. They hit it off immediately; Chelsea is from England, where her new friend Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) used to travel regularly for work. (Her job? Oh, you know, “muddling.”) Another thing the two women have in common: rude, moody, older boyfriends.

Read More: Who Will Die in The White Lotus Season 3? We’ve Got Some Guesses

Chloe and her man aren’t guests of the resort. They own a home nearby, where they’ve lived for a year, but take their meals at its lovely outdoor restaurant. “He’s behind me,” she tells Chelsea. “The bald guy. The one with the orange shirt.” The camera follows Chelsea’s gaze, and there he is: Greg Hunt, alone at a table full of food, frowning into a glass of brown liquor—a forgettable face in a crowd of sullen, shiny-domed, middle-aged white men, each with an unmistakable air of seediness. “The locals call them LBHs: losers back home,” Chloe explains. 

And that’s it—that’s all we see of Greg in the Season 3 premiere.

Greg checked in to the White Lotus midway through its Hawaii-set debut season. In what appeared to be a meet-cute with Tanya, she spotted him struggling to get into her room, which he’d supposedly mistaken for his own. He told her he was on a fishing trip with friends and worked for BLM; she assumed the acronym stood for Black Lives Matter, though he meant the Bureau of Land Management. And he courted her despite her insecurities, drawing her away from her plans to fund spa manager Belinda’s (Natasha Rothwell) dream wellness center. “I just know I’m gonna get hurt,” Tanya told Belinda, in a moment of stunning prescience. Greg also did a lot of coughing, which set the stage for his confession that he had a terminal illness.

So it was a bit of a surprise to see him in Sicily for Season 2, still very much alive and now married to Tanya, whom he credits for finding the doctors who saved his life. Arriving separately from his wife, he was annoyed to find her assistant, Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), tagging along on the trip. After a pasta-and-Vespa date inspired by Tanya’s fantasy of being midcentury Italian screen siren Monica Vitti, Greg was off again—this time, he said, to take care of some business at BLM’s headquarters in Denver. He’d return in just two days, he promised, as she threw one of her signature temper tantrums and offered to cancel their prenup. She never saw him again, except as a younger man in a photo at Quentin’s villa. Greg is almost certainly the heterosexual “cowboy” who broke Quentin’s heart decades ago. Meanwhile, there were clues that Greg had another paramour waiting in the wings. In a secretive phone call at the resort, he said “I love you” to the unknown party at the other end of the line. Later, a psychic Tanya summoned to read her tarot cards broke bad news: “The cards say your husband is in love with someone else.”

Knowing (or at least feeling pretty certain) that Greg was in cahoots with Quentin, plotting to kill Tanya and inherit her millions, recast the couple’s entire relationship. Was their first meeting really an accident? Did he ever work for any organization with the acronym BLM? Did he ever have a terminal illness, or was that just a ploy to siphon money away from Tanya? Could Quentin have been lying when he said Greg was straight—and, in that case, might he have been the person to whom Greg pledged his love over the phone? Alternatively, was Greg also manipulating Quentin? Could there be any truth to the fan theory that Greg was hiding on the boat when Tanya killed Quentin and his minions, then fatally conked herself in the head while escaping? The new season’s introduction of Chloe raises new questions: When did she enter the picture, and how much does she know about Greg’s past?   

Viewers who keep close tabs on the chatter surrounding The White Lotus might not be shocked to see Greg again. Some Lotus-ologists have been predicting his return since he failed to show up in the last episodes of Season 2, in December of 2022. In fact, White teased the possibility of more Greg in a featurette accompanying that season’s finale. “The fact that all of those guys die on the boat, it feels like there’s gotta be somebody who’s gonna track it back down to Greg,” he said. “But maybe you’ll have to wait to find out what happens.” (For her part, Coolidge had this to say: “My hope for Jon is that he's not finished with Greg… I hope there's some comeuppance for evil Greg. I think he should, I don't know, end up in a meat-grinding machine.")

In an interview two years later, in advance of TIME’s feature previewing Season 3, White had more to say about Greg’s reemergence. Conceiving the season, which also features the return of Rothwell as Belinda, he told me during a video call in January, “I got excited, because I was like: This is how we can keep the Tanya storyline alive.” And it made sense to him that Greg would end up among the many LBH expats hiding out from their sordid pasts in Thailand. “This is where he would end up, and this is the kind of situation he'd be in,” White said, noting that there is “some pathos” in Greg’s current predicament, as he lives off Tanya’s fortune. “You've done the deed… Was it all worth it?” At first glance, he doesn’t look ecstatic. The loneliness is palpable. As White pointed out: “These guys, there’s always a woman—usually a much-younger woman—in their life. But you don’t get the sense that there are many other people.”   

As White suggested in the Season 2 finale featurette, the saga of Tanya McQuoid—Lotus’ great, tragicomic, opera-diva heiress—will remain unfinished until we know how Greg ends up. His presence in Thailand makes that resolution possible. Some have speculated that Portia could be the character who puts the pieces of Greg’s betrayal together. (I have no idea whether Richardson makes a surprise return later in the season.) There are also the questions of whether the news of Tanya’s death ever reached Belinda, and whether she recognizes the man whose seduction of her would-be business partner indirectly crushed her dream.

How White chooses to resolve Greg’s story is critical—not just for the sake of the show’s multiseason plot, but because of the statement his fate will inevitably make regarding its overarching ideas. Can ill-gotten money buy happiness? (This question seems like it may also apply to Walton Goggins’ and Jason Isaacs’ characters.) Can Greg, a murderer by proxy whose past likely holds other dark secrets, escape what the recording Sarah Catherine Hook’s Piper listens to, also in the premiere, describes as the prison of identity? Considering how much pain Tanya, in all her spoiled, self-centered misery, caused people like Belinda and Portia, could her death be perceived as anything besides a (darkly hilarious) tragedy? She was hardly a self-made centimillionaire, and it would’ve been hard to watch her flail from one resort to the next over the course of two seasons without concluding that the money had ruined her life. Rather than a blessing he attained through violence, it might be a curse Greg brought upon himself. I mean, name one rich Lotus character who actually seems fulfilled.

Most of all, in a season focused on spirituality, religion, and death, it forces us to consider whether there is such a thing as divine justice in Lotus’ moral universe. The show has made us sit with many injustices, from Jake Lacy’s Shane going home scot-free after killing Armond (Murray Bartlett) in Season 1 to Albie (Adam DiMarco) agreeing to repair his parents’ marriage in exchange for Dom (Michael Imperioli) giving him money to pay off working girls Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and Mia’s (Beatrice Grannò) bogus pimp. On the other hand, it feels thrillingly right when the latter characters rush off to spend Dom’s cash—a transaction he describes as his “karmic payment” to womankind. From a certain angle, Mia and Lucia aren’t so different from Greg; like him, they used sex and lies to get money. When it comes to the ethics of extralegal, DIY wealth redistribution, we may be about to learn where The White Lotus draws a line.