The White Lotus usually doesn’t hesitate to address touchy subjects head-on. (Duke University is very mad about that right now, in fact.) Regardless, one conversation felt like a bridge too far, even for Mike White. In a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Carrie Coon said her character, Laurie, originally had a bit of backstory that the show’s creator decided to cut after the fact.
“You originally found out that her daughter was actually non-binary, maybe trans, and going by they/them. 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 shared, explaining that it was “only a short scene,” but it “did make the question [in episode 3] of whether Kate (Leslie Bibb) voted for Trump so much more provocative and personally offensive to Laurie, considering who her child is in the world.”
The third season of the HBO series was written before the election, which made that Kate scene “randomly current,” as Bibb told Variety earlier this month. (“When we were filming it, it actually felt like it was going to be irrelevant,” she said.) In White’s eyes, it also made Laurie’s approach to the topic a little too pithy given the current moment. “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 explained.
Still, the Gilded Age actor lauded White for his general ability to challenge his viewers. White’s characters are “not just one thing,” she said. “Mike White grew up in the evangelical church… His father wrote a very influential book about what it was like to co*e 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. So Mike doesn’t shy away from challenging cultural conversations, and I really appreciate that about his work.”