“The White Lotus” has gotten political during Season 3, with one viral scene that featured Kate (Leslie Bibb) declining to say whether she voted for Donald Trump or not, shocking her friends Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Laurie (Carrie Coon). But the interaction originally had a more loaded political context, shares Coon.
The star recently told Harper’s Bazaar that a detail about her character’s personal life was cut after the election. The season was written and filmed before Trump was re-elected President.
“You originally found out that her daughter was actually non-binary, maybe trans, and going by they/them,” Coon said. “You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting.”
“It was only a short scene, but for me, it did make the question of whether Kate voted for Trump so much more provocative and personally offensive to Laurie, considering who her child is in the world,” Coon added.
According to the actor, Trump’s re-election made series creator Mike White hesitate about including that character detail in the final cut.
“The season was written before the election. And considering the way the Trump administration has weaponized the cultural war against transgender people even more since then, 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,” Coon continued.
Coon also said that White handles his characters with nuance: “They’re not just one thing.”
“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,” Coon said. “So Mike doesn’t shy away from challenging cultural conversations, and I really appreciate that about his work.”
Bibb also commented on the Trump-focused “White Lotus” scene in an interview with Variety. “When we were filming it, it actually felt like it was going to be irrelevant,” Bibb said. “It’s randomly current.”
