These 2 White Lotus Characters Were Originally Supposed To Hook Up In The Season 3 Finale
Warning: This article contains spoilers for the season three finale of The White Lotus.
The White Lotus creator Mike White has admitted he originally intended for two characters to hook up in the season three finale.
In a bonus episode of the show’s official companion podcast, Mike revealed that in the script, Sarah Catherine Hook’s character Piper Ratliff was initially supposed to have more than one self-realisation upon leaving the monastery.
He explained: “[There was] this whole scene where she’s like, ‘It’s true. Saxon is right about this one thing. I need to get this over with’. After she leaves the monastery, she’s just like, ‘I need to have sex’.”
This apparently led to Piper “scoping the restaurant in the end” and eventually meeting Belinda’s son Zion, played by Nicholas Duvernay, with whom the character was supposed to lose her virginity.
In the end, though, Mike had to trim the episode down for timing reasons, and Piper and Zion’s tryst was one of the casualties.
He claimed: “It would have added, like, 10 minutes to the thing. And it had a little bit of a romantic, rom-com vibe in the middle of like, you know, trying to kill the family.”
“It just felt like I was trying to do too much narratively,” he added, though he maintained he was “very disappointed” about having to make the cut at all.
Meanwhile, Sarah Catherine revealed that “almost every episode” was supposed to feature a scene in which a different so-called “LBH” (that’s “loser back home”, for those with short memories) tried it on with her.
“If you remember in episode two where she’s doing yoga and the guy looks at her, he’s all creepy, and she’s like, ‘Ew’,” Entertainment Weekly quoted Sarah Catherine as saying.
“There was an encounter like that in almost every episode, and it didn’t make it, but I thought it was so funny in the scripts of just a guy checking her out. She’s like, ‘Ew’.”
Other members of the cast have also opened up about different scenes that were shot but not included in the final cut, including a dream sequence that would have been the most “insane” scene of the entire series, and a moment involving Carrie Coon’s character that was cut in light of the 2024 US election.
All three seasons of The White Lotus are available to stream on Now and Sky now.