A star on Season 3 of The White Lotus revealed in a new interview that the show’s creators opted to cut one storyline in particular after Donald Trump won reelection last November.
Carrie Coon, who plays Laurie on the hit HBO series, claimed that the show opted to cut out a scene featuring a conversation about her character’s nonbinary, or possibly transgender child following President Donald Trump’s election win.
“There was a bit more context to her home life,” Coon explained of her character, Laurie, in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar published Friday. “You originally found out that her daughter was actually non-binary, maybe trans, and going by they/them.”
“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.”
Coon proceeded to clarify that The White Lotus’ third season was written before the election, and that the show’s creator, Mike White, felt the scene was too “small” to handle a “topic so big” in the aftermath of Trump’s win—and his administration’s attacks against the transgender community.
“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,” Coon explained.
Set in Thailand, The White Lotus’ third season sees Coon playing a recent divorcée balancing motherhood with her career while reuniting with her longtime friends Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Kate (Leslie Bibb) for an all-inclusive and incredibly toxic girls trip.
As noted by Coon, in the season’s third episode, the trio—or as White has coined, The Blonde Bob—talk Trump during dinner after an awkward slip-up from Kate leads her friends to realize that she may have voted for Trump during the 2016 election—much to their surprise (and annoyance).
