A kind of magic

With upcoming roles in The White Lotus and local production Friends Like Her, Morgana O’Reilly no longer feels the need to prove herself. But her unpedicured feet remain firmly on the ground.

- MICHELE HEWITSON

It is not every day that you get up, turn on your computer and encounter an enchantress, a witch, smiling at you via video link. It is hard to know which of us - the enchantress, the witch who is otherwise known as the actor Morgana Le Fay Naomi Jane O'Reilly, or me - is more excited.

"I feel like I have the weight of the nation behind me," she says. "The excitement of a nation behind me!"

We are both really quite dizzy and most definitely dippy over the news that she has been cast in the third season of HBO's luxuriously loopy White Lotus. In case you have been confined to a desert island with only a coconut tree for company, it is set in fictional, super-luxury resorts where the super-rich, super-screwed-up and super-bored people go. Just, you know, for something to do.

They mostly get super-scammed or murdered. In the meantime, they get to wear ultra-expensive clobber and eat and drink ultra-expensive food and plonk and be rude to under-paid natives before getting the ending they deserve. It's revenge for rudeness to the poor people, who have to cater to their every whim while wearing their fakest smiles.

The most famous cast member, thus far, was the wonderful Jennifer Coolidge, who played the, yes, luxuriously loopy Tanya. She survived the attempts of "the evil gays" to murder her on the luxury yacht they lured her to, only to leap from the boat and cave in her over-coiffured head.

Perhaps, suggested one fan, O'Reilly will turn out to be Tanya's long-lost daughter.

That would be fun. This is a fun story: two weeks after she sent off her audition tape, she got a text while at a friend's wedding. The text, from her agent, said: "Oh my gosh. We've just had the most amazing feedback from the casting agent of White Lotus." The text arrived just as the bride was about to walk down the aisle.