White Lotus writer Mike White on decision to cut trans scene: ‘It felt right in March of last year’
White revealed the political climate, plus pressure from HBO to trim down episodes, had contributed to his decision
By Gary Grimes
Mike White, the writer and creator of The White Lotus, has explained his decision to cut a scene in which it’s revealed Carrie Coon’s character’s child is nonbinary.
Coon recently revealed in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar that the character detail was removed by White in the editing process following the reelection of Donald Trump.
Asked if her character’s backstory was kept purposefully vague, Coon said: “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. 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,” Coon continued. “But for me, it did make the question [in episode three] of whether Kate voted for Trump so much more provocative and personally offensive to Laurie, considering who her child is in the world. But the season was written before the election.”
She also said: “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.”
Now, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, White has elaborated on the decision making process. “It felt right in March of last year,” he admitted. “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.”
“HBO was like, ‘Yeah … you need to figure out how to shape it'” – Mike White
White also revealed that bosses at HBO had come down on him to refine episodes. “As a writer, I got a little indulged,” he said. “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.’
“People are already like, ‘It’s too slow! Let’s go, let’s go! Nothing’s happening!’ But nothing happened in the first season. Literally. It was basically people sitting around eating meals, but the music gave this tension, and you knew something bad was going to happen.”
The season finale of The White Lotus drops this Monday.