The White Lotus season three finale aired this Monday, and some viewers are already hungry for season four.
While it’s not quite the same as enjoying a brand new episode, though., show creator Mike White (along with multiple actors in the HBO hit) has spoken out about scenes that didn’t quite make it to the show.
“There’s a lot of stuff that ended up being cut. Not because it wasn’t cool, I just needed to be hard on the material,” Mike has previously shared.
“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.’”
So, we thought we’d share seven scenes that were never to be:
1) A non-binary storyline was cut because of Trump
Carrie Coon revealed that her character was originally meant to have a non-binary child in the show, and that “Laurie is struggling with her teenager going by ‘they/them’.”
But ultimately Mike White let the storyline go, she says, because the detail was written “before Trump was re-elected and before this war on the trans community was escalated. Mike felt that it was actually too political, or too far, or too distracting.”
Mike added, “It felt right in March of last year. Now, there’s a vibe shift. I don’t think that it was radical, but that’s not the kind of attention I want.
“The politics of it could overwhelm whatever ideas I’m trying to talk about. And a lot of it was about time. Every episode is bulging at 60 minutes.”
2) Kate almost had an ‘insane’ dream sequence filled with clichés about Thailand
Leslie Bibb revealed that her character had “this insane dream sequence with the ladyboys and ping-pong and everything was glowing.
“It was also kind of like The Shining,” she added. “There just wasn’t room for it.”
3) Aimee Lou Wood was meant to say “bad things come in threes” as she died
“Bad things come in threes” was a theme in the show’s most recent season, which Aimee Lou Wood told Variety acted as a “double red herring” from the writers who knew viewers would find the rule “predictable.”
So when her character became a victim to the mantra, Aimee told the publication, she was supposed to have a very on-the-nose line: “She was going to say something about ‘bad things happening in threes’ [to Walter Goggins’ character] originally, and then Mike got rid of that,” the actor said.
“I was so glad that he did, because the silence is really heartbreaking. She speaks so much, and words are her armour.”
4) Sam Nivola’s character was meant to crawl out of a body bag
Sam Nivola, who plays Lochlan on the show, told Deadline that the scene in which he appears to drown following ingestion of poison “was really scary” – but it wasn’t the only terrifying iteration of the scene.
“We did a couple versions of it where I was in a body bag and crawling out of a body bag in my dream,” he revealed.
“And that was so scary, because I had to be zipped in a body bag with no air, and then unzip myself. Of course, it was all safe. They wouldn’t have put me in a in an unsafe situation but it was really scary in a fun way.”
5) Piper and Zion got it on in the original script
Sarah Catherine Hook’s character Piper was originally scripted to have a fling with Nicholas Duvernay, who plays Zion, Mike White shared on the show’s accompanying podcast.
“[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,’” he said.
“After she leaves the monastery, she’s just like, ‘I need to have sex’.”
That led to her character “scoping the restaurant in the end” and eventually losing her virginity to Zion.
Mike said it needed to be cut for timing reasons, though: “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 continued, though he says he’s “very disappointed” about the loss.
6) Jaclyn’s dancing scene originally had more context
Speaking to Bustle, Michelle Monaghan said her character Jaclyn’s so-called “pick me” dance with Velantin in very clear shot of another group of woman originally had more context.
“The three women that Jaclyn is dancing for – or at, however you want to [look at it] – were making fun of them earlier in the day at the bar when they first arrived because [the women] all look like drowned rats from the Songkran Festival,” she said of the cut scene.
“They’re pointing fingers and laughing at them. And Jaclyn was like, ‘Oh, hell no. We’re going downstairs.’”
7) Lochlan was meant to tell his father about a book he was reading
In a Deadline interview, Sam Nivola shared that the rest of the scene following his on-screen father asking his character if he thinks he could live without money “got cut out.”
“He says, What are you reading? And I’m like, I’m reading this book about tsunamis, and f*cking 300,000 people died, or however many it was,” he shared.
“How do you find any meaning in life when it can all just change like that on a dime, which I think was a cool way of describing the turmoil that he’s going through,” the actor continued.
“And then Timothy [Jason Isaacs] says, What if money doesn’t matter or something? And I’m like, okay, I don’t see how that’s related to what I just said and he is just totally thinking about his own thing. That was a funny little bit.”
#Deleted #White #Lotus #Scenes #Season
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