As exhibited by last week’s episode, which featured the Ratliff brothers (Patrick Schwarzenegger and Sam Nivola) getting a bit too intimate with one another, Mike White has never been afraid to 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 her character’s backstory was cut away as a result of the current political climate in America and around the world.
“There was a bit more context to her home life. You originally found out that her daughter was actually non-binary, maybe trans, and going by they/them,” said Coon. “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 explained that it was a “short scene,” but it did provide context to her conflict with friend Kate (Leslie Bibb) revealing herself to be a Trump supporter in episode 3 of this season. Though the season was written before the election, once Trump won, White realized it would be too major a subject to handle in just a referential moment.
“Considering the way the Trump administration has weaponized the cultural war against transgender people even more since then,” Coon said, “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.”
This may seem like a cop-out and a way of avoiding getting caught up in the current attack on the trans community, but Coon doesn’t believe the choice has anything to do with White’s willingness to engage in important dialogues.
“His father wrote a very influential book about what it was like to come out as a gay man himself in the evangelical church as an adult, which a lot of young men have read and was a very meaningful text for them in their own journeys,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “So Mike doesn’t shy away from challenging cultural conversations, and I really appreciate that about his work.”
“The White Lotus” airs Sunday nights at 9pm ET on HBO and streams on Max at the same time.
