In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Carrie Coon, who plays Laurie in season three of The White Lotus, revealed that a storyline about her non-binary or potentially transgender child was cut from the show following Donald Trump’s re-election in the US.
“You originally found out that her daughter was actually nonbinary, maybe trans, and going by they/them,” Coon tells Harper’s Bazaar. “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 a short scene, Coon informs Harper’s Bazaar, but it heightened the now viral conversation between the three friends when Kate (Leslie Bibb) reveals that she voted for Trump. “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’s debatable whether The White Lotus is still as sharp in its political criticism as it was in season one. However, it still attempts to be a political show, so why has it reportedly run away from this meaningful conversation?
“The season was written before the election. And considering the way the Trump administration has weaponised 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.
Coon was quick to stress that the show’s creator, Mike White is not one to run away from challenging cultural conversations. Instead, this was a decision to rectify the fact that the storyline was underdeveloped, and with the current political climate in America, they could not afford to half-ass such a storyline.