- Carrie Coon’s character Laurie had a non-binary child in the original script
- The penultimate episode has just aired
- Trump’s return to the White House changed things
Carrie Coon has revealed her character in The White Lotus had a non-binary child but mentions of them were cut in post-production.
Coon plays Laurie on the show, who is on a girls’ trip to Thailand with old friends Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Kate (Leslie Bibb). Politics creeps into their conversation at one moment in the show, where Kate neither confirms nor denies that she voted for Donald Trump.
However, Coon has now said that it was originally only the tip of the iceberg.
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“You originally found out that her daughter was actually nonbinary, 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.”
“It wasn’t the right way to engage in that conversation”
However, Trump’s return to the White House changed things once the cameras stopped rolling. All writing and filming on the third season took place before he returned to power, and subsequently Mike White thought twice about keeping that detail in.
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“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 praised White’s ability to handle 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.”
Previously, Bibb has commented on that 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.”
What else are people talking about in The White Lotus?
The current season has brought plenty of discourse. The new theme tune has divided fans, for example, while numerous other debates are ongoing.
Walton Goggins has had to defend the age-gap relationship between his character Rick and Chelsea (Aimee Lou-Wood). The most controversial subplot, however, was undoubtedly the incest storyline with Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and Lochlan Ratliff (Sam Nivola).
