How Southern Charm Inspired The White Lotus Season 3’s Ratliff Family

“Many of yall are echoing what I thought as soon as I heard the dad speak,” she wrote in an Instagram Stories post Feb. 24. “‘Damn, he sounds like Thomas Ravenel!’ That dialect is NOT North Carolina. It’s old Charleston.”

Given that the fictional Ratliff family hails from Durham, N.C., Jason previously cited the city as the inspiration for his unique—and polarizing—onscreen drawl, insisting the local accent is “very specific.”

“It sounds a lot like the other Southern accents, but it’s got two vowels in it that sound like upper class English,” the U.K. native explained in an HBO TikTok video Feb. 15. “So, it is weird because nobody listening is used to it, only the people who live locally.”

Meanwhile, Jason’s onscreen wife Parker Posey, who grew up in the American south, pulled from personal experience to achieve what she described as a “snotty effect.”

“I’ve met some really wealthy people and Southerners that are almost affected so that’s what I did,” she told Variety in an interview published Feb. 17, adding, “It was so fun to play.”