Canadian star Adam DiMarco checks into a new season of The White Lotus

A second season of HBO's social satire The White Lotus premiered on Sunday — and its Canadian star, Adam DiMarco, says he still wonders if the whole experience was a dream.

"I had read the script, I'd seen it a couple times before the premiere, went to the premiere, and I was still picking up on things, subtleties and allusions," he said in an interview with q's Tom Power.

"I'm excited to see the rest of the season and be reminded that it was real."

Set at the fictional White Lotus beach resort — where flustered hotel staff tend to the every demand of their ultra-wealthy, ultra-whiny guests — each season starts with a dead body. You just don't know whose, or why, or how. 

DiMarco co-stars in Season 2 as Albie di Grasso, a 20-something who accompanies his sex-addicted father, Dominic (The Sopranos' Michael Imperioli), and his lecherous grandpa Bert (Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham) to the resort's Sicily location.

The getaway is meant to be an exploration of the family's heritage, and an escape after Dominic is caught cheating on Albie's mother.

WATCH | The trailer for The White Lotus Season 2:

DiMarco says he was right at home on set with Imperioli — who skyrocketed to fame as the young mafioso Christopher Moltisanti in HBO's The Sopranos — who felt "like a surrogate father at times," he said.

"He's just very grounded, funny, obviously talented, just a genuinely good guy to work with and be around. I felt very, very lucky that I had him as my TV dad," DiMarco said.

First season took home 10 Emmy Awards

The White Lotus was created by Mike White, who was also the showrunner behind HBO's Enlightenment. White was a contestant of several seasons of reality TV shows The Amazing Race and Survivor before he made Lotus.

"I notice a lot of similarities between Survivor and The White Lotus," DiMarco said, observing that each series opens with a boat of strangers arriving on an unfamiliar island. 

"Both shows really dig into the social game, social politics between people from various walks of life."

As the guests at The White Lotus cross paths with one another — an ensemble cast that includes Jennifer Coolidge, Aubrey Plaza, Will Sharpe, Haley Lu Richardson, Tom Hollander, Theo James and Meghann Fahy — they realize that a trip to paradise isn't all it's cracked up to be.

The first season, which took home the prize for best limited series (and nine other awards) at the 2022 Emmy Awards in September, was led by Connie Britton, Steve Zahn, Jake Lacy, Murray Bartlett, Alexandra Daddario and Sydney Sweeney. 

Coolidge, the only top-billed cast member to reprise her role in the second season, won best actress in a limited series.

'I just had a kind of epiphany'

DiMarco, who hails from Oakville, Ont., was stuck in a depressed rut while studying life sciences at McMaster University. He turned to movies and TV shows in his spare time, and a lightbulb went off. 

"I just had a kind of epiphany one day. I was like, this looks like a fun industry to work in," DiMarco said. "I thought about being a writer, and then I thought, you know what, let me try acting first and see if I like it."

The performer left school, moved to Vancouver by himself and enrolled in acting classes. Eventually, he landed an audition for the second season of The White Lotus, and binge-watched its first season to prep.

If the show's first season tackled colonialism in Hawaii — building the tension between the resort's wealthy guests, the harried wait staff and Indigenous Hawaiians in a commentary on class, race and privilege — the second season is all about sexual politics in Sicily.

But its larger-than-life characters — like Imperioli's Hollywood bigwig, Coolidge's childlike socialite, Plaza's self-righteous lawyer or James's smarmy tech-bro billionaire — don't just make for good TV.

"As tourist season approached, the hotel opened up to other people. So we would just see, essentially, the real-life version of some of our characters entering this hotel," DiMarco said.

"Just like, oh, I think I'm playing that guy … It just made people-watching really fun."