Mike White Reveals ‘The White Lotus’ Finale Originally Included a ‘Rom-Com’ Sex Scene with Piper and Zion

"It just felt like I was trying to do too much narratively," White said of the 90-minute finale.

[Editor’s note: The following story contains spoilers for “The White Lotus” Season 3, Episode 8, “Amor Fati.”]

“The White Lotus” creator Mike White revealed another would-be viral scene that didn’t quite make it into the Season 3 finale. White said during the “‘White Lotus’ Official Podcast” bonus episode, as hosted by Jia Tolentino and Josh Bearman, that there was a deleted scene where Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) becomes determined to shed her virginity after deciding against her plan to live in the Buddhist monastery. In turn, she returns to the resort and seduces fellow hotel guest Zion (Nicholas Duvernay).

(Read the IndieWire review of the finale here.)

“That part was cut too, which is very disappointing, is that she decides to lose her virginity in the script in the last episode. And she actually has sex with Zion,” White said. “There’s this whole scene where she’s like, ‘It’s true. Saxon is right about this one thing. I need to get this over with.’ And you know how after she leaves the monastery she’s just like, ‘I need to have sex.’ But in the end, it was one of these things where it was like, it’s already an hour and a half. It would have added 10 minutes to the thing. And it had a little bit of a rom-com vibe in the middle of trying to kill the family with the pong pong fruits. It just felt like I was trying to do too much narratively.”

White also pointed to the “symmetry” of desires as embodied by siblings Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), Piper, and Lochlan (Sam Nivola), with the trio representing three different idealizations of how to live.

“A lot of times, people that retreat from life are just afraid they’re not going to get what they want, or they say they don’t actually want the things they want,” White said. “And Buddhism, to me, is a whole religion about that, which is renounce things because wanting things is suffering.”

As Saxon craves too much, Piper represses her own carnality, and Lochlan is caught between his two older siblings as he tries to navigate his own place in both the family and the world.

And the aforementioned tryst between Piper and Zion was not the only scene left in the editing room: Carrie Coon told Harper’s Bazaar that she was part of a “short scene” that included the backstory of her character Laurie’s child.

“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,” 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.”

She added that amid the Trump administration’s attempts to legally abolish transgender people, White decided not to include the scene. “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 said. “Mike doesn’t shy away from challenging cultural conversations, and I really appreciate that about his work.”

Co-star Schwarzenegger also told Variety that time has been an issue for each episode length, saying of the 90-minute finale, “Mike likes ambiguity. He wants people to have these conversations. He shot two-and-a-half hours for the finale and boiled it down to 90 minutes. That’s already a stretch for HBO to give.”