Inside The White Lotus season 4’s luxury 5-star hotel in Cannes, France

The White Lotus is jetting off to Cannes for its fourth season, once again putting the spotlight on the ultra-wealthy. While the show – which follows the exploits of guests and staff at a fictional luxury resort chain – involves some pretty unpleasant characters, it is hard to fault the glitzy Cannes location. Filming for the hit HBO anthology series is under way at the Hotel Martinez, but staff at the five-star Hyatt hotel will not tell me much. “It’s going to be gigantic,” general manager Michel Cottray says. He knew little about Mike White’s show a year ago, but has now binged it all with his wife. “I’m an expert, you can ask me what happened in series two episode four, what happened in Taormina? I know,” he says. Bafta-winner Laura Dern, star of Jurassic Park and Marriage Story, will step into the Cote d’Azur for the morbid satire’s star-studded new season, as well as fellow Bafta-winner Steve Coogan, aka Alan Partridge. French actor Vincent Cassel, known for La Haine and Black Swan, has also been cast, along with Ugly Betty and New Girl’s Max Greenfield. “Season 4 is about fame,” White told Entertainment Tonight. Hotel Martinez makes sense as the setting. Built in 1929, it is part of silver screen history and a short walk from the Cannes Film Festival’s Palais des Festivals site. Its blue-carpeted spiral staircase has peppered many a celebrity’s camera roll during the festival, which this year runs from May 12 to 23. “Just before the red carpet, we say, they use the blue carpet,” says Marie-Claire Boudaud, the hotel’s director of communications. “You see all the celebrities with nice dresses here on the stairs, lots of photographers take pictures.” People staying on the first floor will get the lift up and walk down just for the photo. Mads Mikkelsen and Andie MacDowell are hotel regulars, Boudaud says. Tom Cruise and Angelina Jolie have stayed, and previous film festival guests include Adrien Brody, Elle Fanning and Jane Fonda. The hotel is all about luxury, particularly the top floor, where a pair of interconnecting two-bedroom, two-bathroom suites can be booked together for a 1,250-square-metre (13,450 square foot) luxury space that can go for up to €30,000 (US$35,000) a night in peak season. The combined space forms one of the largest suites in Europe, Boudaud says. The hotel’s La Palme d’Or restaurant boasts Cannes’ only Michelin star and hosts the traditional dinner for the film festival’s jury. Cinephile chef Jean Imbert curates a menu from the jury president’s filmography. This year’s president is Park Chan-wook, behind The Handmaiden and Oldboy – the first South Korean to hold the role. Dinner guests seeking privacy can book a room. The stand-out, though, is the hotel’s Martinez Bar, for an array of refined small plates and cocktails. “I love my bar more than me,” manager Delphine Grossmann says. “It is the first time that I built something by myself.” Delphine was previously at La Mamounia in Marrakech, Morocco, which is ranked among the world’s best hotels and was one of Winston Churchill’s favourites. She was the first woman to run its bar. The invitation-only film festival launched in 1946 and is considered the world’s most prestigious. But there is also a lesser-known side to Cannes. After a 20-minute boat ride from the opulent city, we are paddling in the Med off an island inhabited by monks. An 11th century fortified tower stands on the peninsula ahead, beside us looms a graffitied Nazi-built bunker and in the woodland behind are ruined Napoleonic furnaces once used to make cannonballs. Neptune grass sticks to our feet as we return to the dry rocks. The tourist board is seeking Unesco heritage status for this island, called Saint-Honorat, in the Lerins archipelago off Cannes. Historians previously debated whether to keep the German bunker because of its builders’ crimes, explains our guide Florence de Barros Conti. They decided to do so, but it has not yet been restored. Militarism, religion and nature collide here, where the 21 Cistercian monks, living in the Abbaye de Lerins, cultivated an eight-hectare (19.8-acre) vineyard for wine and liqueurs. The island’s monastery was founded around AD400. It is one of the oldest monastic hubs in the West. The abbey’s gates are closed for midday prayer, so we start our hour-long walk around the island’s perimeter, stopping at some of its seven chapels. We are buffeted by sweet honey wafts of Pittosporum, and our guide shows me plant after plant: wild fennel and asparagus, Cistus flowers, laurel and pines. Bizarrely, pheasants shout. They come to escape the guns during hunting season, our guide says, and the male I spot dashing through the vines is fatter and probably older than any I have seen in the UK. Lunch is panzanella then salmon with pesto pasta, both laden with ricotta, at La Tonnelle’s tables on sand overlooking the sea. Wine is monk-made. Saint-Honorat overlooks the larger inhabited Sainte-Marguerite island, home to the mystery of the Man in the Iron Mask, which is notorious among locals. Visitors to that island can swim to an underwater eco-museum with six two-metre-high submerged sculptures made by British artist Jason deCaires Taylor. The sculptures – giant faces cast from Cannes residents – have drawn aquatic life back to Sainte-Marguerite’s shore. Back in the centre of the resort town, preparations are under way for the coming 79th Cannes Film Festival. Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s film Bitter Christmas will draw crowds, as will Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, starring Sandra Hüller from Anatomy of a Fall, and South Korean sci-fi thriller Hope, featuring Michael Fassbender.

Inside The White Lotus season 4’s luxury 5-star hotel in Cannes, France

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Guests including Tom Cruise and Angelina Jolie have stayed at Hotel Martinez in Cannes, whose top suite goes for up to US$35,000 a night

Guests including Tom Cruise and Angelina Jolie have stayed at Hotel Martinez in Cannes, whose top suite goes for up to US$35,000 a night