- Carrie Coon revealed that her character Laurie had a deeper connection to her passion for politics
- In episode 3, Laurie, Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Kate (Leslie Bibb) discussed President Donald Trump in a tense discussion where Kate refused to reveal who she voted for
- Coon explained that creator Mike White didn’t feel the scene was the right way to “engage in that conversation” after Trump’s reelection and cut it
Carrie Coon is shedding light on one White Lotus scene that didn’t make the final cut.
In a recent interview with Harper’s Bazaar, the actress revealed that there was more to the episode 3 scene in which Kate (Leslie Bibb) danced around the topic of President Donald Trump after her girlfriends Laurie (Coon) and Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) probed about what her life in Texas was like.
The conversation elicited mixed reactions from viewers, and Coon said that there was a part of Laurie’s storyline that dug even deeper into the current political climate.
“You originally found out that her daughter was actually nonbinary, maybe trans, and going by they/them,” she told the outlet. “You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting.”
The scene, although “short,” added another layer of tension to the already awkward dynamic among the trio, Coon explained.
“For me, 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,” she said, noting that the show’s creator, Mike White, ultimately decided not to include it after Trump was reelected.
“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 said.
She added that White always makes sure that he creates characters so that “they’re not just one thing,” and that comes from his upbringing.
“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,” Coon said. “So Mike doesn’t shy away from challenging cultural conversations, and I really appreciate that about his work.”
The March 2 episode showed the ladies questioning Kate for saying she spends a lot of time at her church in Texas. When Jaclyn labeled them as “Bible thumpers” who “voted for Trump,” Kate defended them as “nice people,” leading Laurie to ask if it got awkward when politics came up.
“Why would it?” Kate wondered, sharing that her husband is a Republican and she is an independent.
When asked if she voted for Trump, Kate let out a sigh and said, “Are we really going to talk about Trump tonight? It is a very pretty church. It’s not weird at all.”
Bibb opened up about the scene in an interview with Entertainment Weekly earlier this month, saying she felt like White “had binoculars into the future because when we did it, it just didn’t feel [timely anymore].”
“I was like, ‘We already did that. That was in the past.’ I don’t even think Trump was running when we did it — it was in January or February of last year or something, so yeah, that was pretty wild,” she revealed. “But he’s like a little soothsayer, that Mike White. It feels like we’ve hit a nerve. We’re in the zeitgeist, as they say. We’ve done something current, if you will.”
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Season 3 of The White Lotus airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and Max.
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