Season 3 of The White Lotus has its fair share of queer representation — well, it does if you count the Ratliff brothers’ wild night. And of course, the whole series is the brainchild of Mike White, the king of creating evil gays.
But apparently, this season originally had another queer character who wound up on the cutting room floor. Laurie, played by Carrie Coon, is one of the so-called “Blonde Blob,” the trio of childhood friends who are gossiping about one another nonstop while on vacation in Thailand. In a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar, she revealed that her character’s daughter, Ellie, was originally written to be nonbinary.
“There was a bit more context to her home life,” Coon said. “You originally found out that her daughter was actually nonbinary, 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.”
Ultimately, though, the scene where Ellie’s nonbinary identity was revealed didn’t make the show’s final cut. Coon said that White chose to omit the moment considering the Trump administration’s attacks on the trans community, something he hadn’t anticipated when writing the plot point prior to election day.
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“The season was written before the election,” she explained. “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.”
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Coon’s character having a nonbinary child does lend more context to one of the season’s most talked about scenes: when Kate (Leslie Bibb) is implied to have voted for Trump.
“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,” Coon said.
Coon also reflected on the fact that, though the character Kate is demographically different from the average White Lotus watcher (read: much more conservative), she’s portrayed as one of the show’s most logical characters — apart, perhaps, from her voting habits.
“That’s why it’s fun to watch Mike’s characters. They’re not just one thing,” Coon said. “Mike White grew up in the evangelical church. He grew up in some pretty specific communities, some of which were maybe not as welcoming to him, ultimately. 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. So Mike doesn’t shy away from challenging cultural conversations, and I really appreciate that about his work.”
The season finale of The White Lotus airs Sunday, April 6 on HBO. Check out the episode preview below.
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