As the episode of last week explained, which featured the Ratliff Brothers (Patrick Schwarzenegger and Sam Nivola) becoming a little too intimate with each other, Mike White was never afraid of go there With “The White Lotus”. However, speaking in a recent interview with Harper’s Bazaar, one of the current stars of the show, Carrie Coon, shared that some of the floors of her character had been cut following the current political climate in America and in the world.
“There was a little more context in his family life. You originally discovered that his daughter was in fact 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.”
Coon explained that it was a “short scene”, but it provided a context to her conflict with friend Kate (Leslie Bibb) turned out to be a Trump supporter in episode 3 of this season. Although the season was written before the elections, once Trump won, White realized that he would be too major a subject to manage in a benchmark moment.
“Given how the Trump administration has armed the cultural war against transgender people even more since then,” said Coon, “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.”
This may seem like a cop and a way to avoid being caught in the current attack on the Trans community, but Coon does not believe that the choice has something to do with White’s will to engage in important dialogues.
“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,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “So Mike does not hesitate to question cultural conversations, and I really appreciate this about his work.”
“The White Lotus” is broadcast on Sunday evenings at 9 p.m. HB on HBO and rivers in Max at the same time.
