According to Carrie Coon, who plays Laurie, there were also several moments between the three blonde friends that ended up on the cutting room floor, including one in which Kate (Leslie Bibb) goes on an extended discussion of pickleball. “Most of the scenes with the women were some of the longest in the scripts,” Coon told The Unwrapped Podcast. “[Bibb] had a whole monologue about pickleball,” Coon shared, “And a whole dream sequence of Kate that never made it to air.”
One moment between the women that did make it onto the show, the discussion of beans, was actually a much longer and highly improved bit when originally filmed, Coon said. “Mike just let the bean stuff — he was like, ‘And now Laurie, say you love medium beans!’ He just wanted more beans in prestige TV.”
Piper losing her virginity to Belinda’s son Zion.
If it weren’t for the already 90-minute runtime, the season three finale episode might have included Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) losing her virginity to Belinda’s son Zion (Nicholas Duvernay). The fact that the scene had to be scrapped was “very disappointing” to show creator and director Mike White. Plus, White said on The White Lotus Official Podcast, “It had a little bit of a romantic rom-com vibe in the middle of [Timothy] trying to kill the family with the pong pong fruits.”
The idea behind the scene was that Piper, in addition to proving her mother right with her disappointment about the monastery, had also taken it to heart when her brother Saxon mocked her for being a virgin in an earlier episode. “She’s like, ‘It’s true, Saxon’s right about this one thing, I need to get this over with,’” White said on the podcast. “After she leaves the monastery, she’s just like, ‘I need to have sex.’”
Laurie has a non-binary child.
Back in March, Coon told Harper’s Bazaar that her character, Laurie, was written to have a non-binary child who used they/them pronouns. “You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting,” Coon said. “It was only a short scene, but for me, it did make the question [in episode three] of whether Kate voted for Trump so much more provocative and personally offensive to Laurie, considering who her child is in the world.”
However, it was written before the election, Coon explained, which changed the political and cultural dynamics. “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.
Jim’s dying last word.
Fabio Lovino/HBO
Jim Hollinger’s (Scott Glenn) last word to his son Rick (Walton Goggins) might have been very different. After Rick shoots Jim and kills him, Glenn told The Hollywood Reporter, there was one take where Glenn said a Thai word, “Buakaw,” which means “white lotus,” but is also the name of a famous Muay Thai athlete, Buakaw Banchamek. Glenn explained that the lotus is the main symbol of Thai Buddhism, and the White Lotus represents spiritual perfection, which is where he imagined his character got the name for the hotel.
“When I got to Thailand, one of the things I did in preparation for the part was to find something that would give me a rhythm of the country. So I studied two types of martial arts, one of which was Muay Baram, which is Muay Thai but without the gloves and with no rules,” Glenn explained. “[‘Buakaw’] wasn’t to Rick. It was kind of to Sritala. But it was more just to myself: the realisation that I’ve been shot, I’m dying. In my mind, part of Jim coming to Thailand had to mean he accepted Thai Buddhism.”
This article was originally published in GLAMOUR US.