Mike White talks about the deleted scene

(Publisher’s note: The following story contains spoilers for “The White Lotus” season 3, episode 8, “Amor Fati”.)

The creator of “The White Lotus”, Mike White, revealed another potential viral scene which did not quite make the final of season 3. White said that during the episode of the official bonus of “White Lotus”, known by Jia Tolentino and Josh Bearman, that he was a deleted scene where Piper (Sarah Catherine) is determined to lose her Virginity after having decided against his plan of living in the Buddhist monastery. In turn, she returns to the complex and seduces her other client of the Zion hotel (Nicholas Duvernay).

(Read the Indiewire review of the final here.)

“This part was also cut, what is very disappointing is that it decides to lose its virginity in the scenario in the last episode. And it actually has sex with Sion,” said White. “There is all this scene where it is like:” It’s true. Saxon is right on this one thing. I need to finish that. And you know how after leaving the monastery, it is just like: “I need to have sex”. But in the end, it was one of those things where it was like, it’s already an hour and a half.

White also underlined the “symmetry” of desires as embodied by the Saxon brothers and sisters (Patrick Schwarzenegger), Piper and Lochlan (Sam Nivola), the trio representing three different idealizations in the way of living.

“Often, people who withdraw from life are just afraid that they don’t get what they want, or they say they don’t really want the things they want,” said White. “And Buddhism, for me, is a whole religion on this subject, which renounces things because wanting things suffering.”

While Saxon sucks too much, Piper represses his own carnatic, and Lochlan is taken between his two older brothers and sisters while he tries to sail in his own place in the family and the world.

And the aforementioned meeting between Piper and Zion was not the only scene on the left in the editing room: Carrie Coon told Harper’s Bazaar that she was part of a “short scene” which included the background of the child of her character Laurie.

“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.”

She added that in the midst of the Trump administration attempts to legally abolish the transgender, White decided not to include the scene. “When the time came to reduce the episode, Mike felt that the scene was so small and that the subject was so big that it was not the right way to get involved in this conversation,” said Coon. “Mike does not hesitate to question cultural conversations, and I really appreciate this about his work.”

The Co-Star Schwarzenegger also told Variety that time had been a problem for each episode duration, saying the 90-minute final, “Mike likes ambiguity. He wants people to have these conversations. He fired two and a half hours for the final and made him pass to 90 minutes. It is already a section for HBO to give.”