‘The White Lotus’ you didn’t see: Piper’s sex scene, Lochlan’s body bag, and ‘Shining’-esque ping-pong
The 90-minute season finale of The White Lotus was full of twists and turns, yet it wasn't exactly what creator Mike White originally envisioned.
After the episode aired Sunday, White and his cast members revealed that there were many scenes that were filmed but eventually cut from the finale, including several jaw-dropping moments.
The most shocking plot point that didn't see the light of day involved Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), who hooks up with Belinda's son, Zion (Nicholas Duvernay). White revealed in the HBO show’s official podcast that the scene was in his original script.
“She decides to lose her virginity in the script in the last episode,” White said. “And she actually has sex with Zion. There’s 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.'”
Ultimately, White felt the episode was already jam-packed and decided to cut it.
“In the end, it was one of these things where it was like, it’s already an hour and a half. It would have added 10 minutes to the thing. And it had a little bit of a rom-com vibe in the middle of trying to kill the family with the pong pong fruits. It just felt like I was trying to do too much narratively.”
Patrick Schwarzenegger, who portrayed Saxon on the show, recently shared that White's first pass at the finale ran two-and-a-half hours before paring it down to 90 minutes.
"Mike enjoys ambiguity and wants people to engage in these kinds of discussions," Schwarzenegger explained, referring to some of the unresolved questions at the end of the series, such as whether Saxon knew Chelsea had died.
It wasn't just the finale that needed trimming. There was plenty of material that ended up on the cutting-room floor throughout the season.
"There’s a lot of stuff that ended up being cut. Not because it wasn’t cool, but because I needed to be tough on the material. As a writer, I got a little indulged. The episodes were coming in at an hour and 40 minutes, and HBO was like, 'Yeah … you need to figure out how to shape it,'" White told The Hollywood Reporter.
Carrie Coon told Harper’s Bazaar about a scene that didn’t air, in which her character Laurie tells friends Kate (Leslie Bibb) and Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) that her child is nonbinary.
"You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting," she said. This, she noted, made Kate's conversation about President Donald Trump "so much more provocative and personally offensive to Laurie."
In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, White explained that he decided to remove the nonbinary storyline due to a "political vibe shift" after the election. While he acknowledged it was an important topic, he felt it could overshadow other themes in the show.
White's fellow Survivor castaways Natalie Cole and Carl Boudreaux told Gold Derby that their cameo in the season-opening episode initially involved "dozens of lines" of dialogue, including "a back-and-forth" with Nathasha's Rothwell's Belinda, none of which made it air.
Bibb also revealed that a scene in which her character has a strange dream was also cut. "[There were] ladyboys and ping-pong, and everything was glowing," she recalled. "It was also kind of like The Shining. There just wasn’t room for it."
Meanwhile, Sam Nivola told Deadline that his character, Lochlan Ratliff, had even more intense moments than what viewers saw during his death scene.
"We did a couple versions where I was in a body bag and crawling out of it in my dream. And that was so scary, because I had to be zipped into a body bag with no air, and then unzip myself. Of course, it was all safe," he said. "They wouldn’t have put me in an unsafe situation, but it was really scary in a fun way."