Los Angeles, California - Frisky tourists, searing heat, and monkeys: Thailand was the perfect setting for the new season of HBO's The White Lotus to explore the dark secrets and base desires of the jet-set class, its creator said Monday.

After visits to Hawaii and Sicily, season three of the smash-hit steamy satire about well-heeled and badly-behaved hotel guests takes place on the tropical island of Koh Samui.

The cast and crew spent six months, primarily at the Four Seasons Resort Koh Samui, which served as the show's main setting and the actors' real-life hotel.

According to creator Mike White, it was the hardest season yet, not just due to the expanding number of characters and episodes (eight).

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"Thailand was a beautiful place to shoot, but it also had a lot of challenges," White told a press conference Monday.

"There were days I was like, 'Maybe I'll just die today, I don't know!' So I'm proud that I got through it."

The shoot had to contend with sweltering temperatures, outbreaks of dengue fever and food poisoning, and wildlife including giant monitor lizards, snakes, and tarantulas, according to a recent Guardian article.

Actors described a "claustrophobic" atmosphere in which "tensions and difficulties" and "off-screen drama" were rife – all fueled by the hotel's open-bar policy.

Actor Walton Goggins, who plays a surly tourist with a young girlfriend (Aimee Lee Wood) and a mysterious vendetta, described the experience as like being "in my own Apocalypse Now."

"It was a reckoning... spirituality, life and death, and 18 really talented actors in front of the camera that Mike assembled, going through an existential crisis... sequestered in a five-star resort."

Leslie Bibb, playing one of a trio of female friends trying to rekindle the closeness of their younger days, described the shoot as "hot-ass, haunting chaos."

The White Lotus season three debuts on HBO this Sunday.