“The White Lotus” became a political during season 3, with a viral scene that featured Kate (Leslie Bibb) refusing to say if she voted for Donald Trump or not, shocking her friends Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Laurie (Carrie Coon). But the interaction originally had a more busy political context, sharing Coon.
The star recently told Harper’s Bazaar that a detail on the personal life of his character had been cut after the elections. The season was written and filmed before Trump was re -elected president.
“You originally discovered that his daughter was actually non-binary, perhaps trans and that these,” said Coon. “You see Laurie who finds it difficult to explain it to her friends, who has trouble using these pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting.”
“It was only a short scene, but for me, it made the question of whether Kate voted for Trump much more provocative and personally offensive for Laurie, considering who is her child in the world,” added Coon.
According to the actor, Trump’s re -election made the creator of the Mike White series hesitate about the inclusion of this character detail in the final cup.
“The season was written before the elections. And given how the Trump administration armed the cultural war against transgender people even more since then, when the time has come to reduce the episode, Mike estimated that the scene was so small and the subject so big that it was not the right way to engage this conversation,” Coon continued.
Coon also said that White manages her characters with nuance: “It’s not just a thing.”
“His father wrote a very influential book on what it was to go out as a gay man in the evangelical church in adulthood, which many young men have read and were a very significant text for them in their own trips,” said Coon. “So Mike does not hesitate to question cultural conversations, and I really appreciate this about his work.”
Bibb also commented on the “White Lotus” scene focused on Trump in an interview with Variety. “When we filled it, I had the impression that it was not going to be unimportant,” said Bibb. “It’s current at random.”
