“The White Lotus” draws a line somewhere.
Carrie Coon revealed in a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar that details about her character Laurie’s backstory was cut from the incest-filled third season of the HBO series because of real-world events.
“There was a bit more context to her home life. You originally found out that her daughter was actually non-binary, maybe trans, and going by they/them,” said Coon, 44.
“You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting,” she continued. “It was only a short scene, but for me, it did make the question [in episode 3] of whether Kate voted for Trump so much more provocative and personally offensive to Laurie, considering who her child is in the world.”
But according to Coon, creator Mike White cut the scene during post-production after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election.
“The season was written before the election. And considering the way the Trump administration has weaponized the cultural war against transgender people even more since then, when the time came to cut the episode down, Mike felt that the scene was so small and the topic so big that it wasn’t the right way to engage in that conversation,” she said.
Despite White’s decision, Coon noted that the Emmy Award winner “doesn’t shy away from challenging cultural conversations.”
“And I really appreciate that about his work,” the actress added.
In “The White Lotus,” Coon plays a New York-based corporate lawyer and recent divorcée who reunites with her two longtime friends Kate (Leslie Bibb) and Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) in Thailand.
As Coon mentioned, Episode 3 features a scene where Kate implies her husband voted for Trump and says that she’s an Independent — which doesn’t sit well with Laurie and Jaclyn.
Bibb, 51, previously told Variety that White, 54, wrote the Trump scene before the latest election.
“When we were filming it, it actually felt like it was going to be irrelevant,” Bibb told the outlet. “It’s randomly current. I think it’s so easy to be divisive, and it felt like Mike — not that he wasn’t picking a side — was just showing that not everybody’s a villain. She wasn’t going to ruin this holiday over who she voted for.”
Bibb also said that she didn’t think about how people may react to politics in the show while she was prepping for the scene because “then I’m putting the cart before the horse.”
“I love Kate,” Bibb added, “and I didn’t judge her. I love how she can never have silence, she doesn’t want to ruin anything, she always wants to keep this group together.”
“The White Lotus” airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO and Max.
