“The White Lotus” attracts a line someplace.
Carrie Coon revealed in a brand new interview with Harper’s Bazaar that particulars about her character Laurie’s backstory was minimize from the incest-filled third season of the HBO sequence due to real-world occasions.
“There was a bit more context to her home life. You originally found out that her daughter was actually non-binary, maybe trans, and going by they/them,” mentioned Coon, 44.
“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 continued. “It was only a short scene, but for me, it did make the question [in episode 3] of whether Kate voted for Trump so much more provocative and personally offensive to Laurie, considering who her child is in the world.”
However in keeping with Coon, creator Mike White minimize the scene throughout post-production after Donald Trump gained the 2024 presidential election.
“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,” she mentioned.
Regardless of White’s choice, Coon famous that the Emmy Award winner “doesn’t shy away from challenging cultural conversations.”
“And I really appreciate that about his work,” the actress added.
In “The White Lotus,” Coon performs a New York-based company lawyer and up to date divorcée who reunites along with her two longtime mates Kate (Leslie Bibb) and Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) in Thailand.
As Coon talked about, Episode 3 incorporates a scene the place Kate implies her husband voted for Trump and says that she’s an Impartial — which doesn’t sit properly with Laurie and Jaclyn.
Bibb, 51, beforehand informed Selection that White, 54, wrote the Trump scene earlier than the newest election.
“When we were filming it, it actually felt like it was going to be irrelevant,” Bibb informed the outlet. “It’s randomly current. I think it’s so easy to be divisive, and it felt like Mike — not that he wasn’t picking a side — was just showing that not everybody’s a villain. She wasn’t going to ruin this holiday over who she voted for.”
Bibb additionally mentioned that she didn’t take into consideration how folks could react to politics within the present whereas she was prepping for the scene as a result of “then I’m putting the cart before the horse.”
“I love Kate,” Bibb added, “and I didn’t judge her. I love how she can never have silence, she doesn’t want to ruin anything, she always wants to keep this group together.”
“The White Lotus” airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO and Max.
