Tag: Mike White

If you’re still hungry for more after The White Lotus’s April 6 season-three finale, you can always scour the cutting-room floor. Writer-director Mike White told the Hollywood Reporter some of his episodes originally came in at an hour and 40 minutes before getting cut down to the tight hours that aired. (Meanwhile, the 90-minute finale was originally shot as two and a half hours, per star Patrick Schwarzenegger.) “As a writer, I got a little indulged,” White admitted.

Luckily, for months now, some of the show’s stars have been revealing their cut moments, including bigger conversations and more fantasies. So, what else did we miss out on this season (other than a bangin’ theme song)? Below, all the deleted scenes from White Lotus season three, updated as more secrets come out.

The surprise that Kate (may have) voted for Donald Trump originally carried much higher stakes. Carrie Coon told Harper’s Bazaar that, earlier in the season, Laurie shared that her kid is nonbinary. “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 said. That then made Kate’s conversation about Trump “so much more provocative and personally offensive to Laurie,” Coon added. However, White later cut the scene because it was “too political, or too far, or too distracting,” Coon told the Hollywood Reporter. White added to The Hollywood Reporter he didn’t want that detail to “overwhelm” his messaging. “It felt right in March of last year,” he said. “Now, there’s a vibe shift.”

Leslie Bibb also told The Hollywood Reporter about a fantastical scene with Kate that got left on the cutting-room floor. “Kate had this insane dream sequence with the ladyboys and ping-pong and everything was glowing,” she said. “It was also kind of like The Shining.” When? Why? Could it have led to Kate checking out of the White Lotus with new politics? We can only dream of that.

The women Jaclyn eyed while dancing in the club with the Russian men originally played a bigger role in that scene. Michelle Monaghan told Bustle those same women saw the trio of friends at the bar earlier, when they looked “like drowned rats” after getting soaked on the street. “They’re pointing fingers and laughing at them,” Monaghan said. “And Jaclyn was like, Oh, hell no. We’re going downstairs.”

At one point, Saxon’s emotional look at Chelsea reuniting with Rick on the beach was much more eventful. “I actually played a version of that scene where it’s full come-to-Jesus, where Saxon is just so sweet to the girls,” Schwarzenegger told Variety. But White quickly decided that wasn’t right. “He didn’t want some huge change for Saxon yet — just a small moment and to hold on my face as I watch her go off into the distance,” Schwarzenegger continued.

Yeah, we missed out on more tsunami talk. Sam Nivola shared that, in a longer version of Tim Ratliff’s conversation with Lochlan about living without money, Jason Isaacs’s character asked Lochlan about the book he was reading. “And I’m like, I’m reading this book about tsunamis, and fucking 300,000 people died, or however many it was,” Nivola told Deadline. “How do you find any meaning in life when it can all just change like that on a dime? Which I think was a cool way of describing the turmoil that he’s going through.” But that metaphor was lost on a drugged-out Tim. “And then Timothy says, What if money doesn’t matter? or something,” Nivola continued. “And I’m like, Okay, I don’t see how that’s related to what I just said, and he is just totally thinking about his own thing.”

But not to leave the resort. Nivola also revealed that during his character’s near-death experience, after accidentally making a suicide-fruit smoothie, he had a fantasy of escaping one of the show’s iconic body bags. “And that was so scary, because I had to be zipped in a body bag with no air, and then unzip myself,” he told Deadline.

We may never know what happened before this picture.

Saxon was right: Piper is a virgin. White cut an entire plotline from the finale in which, after returning from the monastery, Piper decides to have sex for the first time — with Zion, Belinda’s son. “There’s this whole scene where she’s like, It’s true,” White said on The White Lotus Official Podcast. “Saxon is right about this one thing. I need to get this over with.” White said the story line “would have added ten minutes” to the already long finale, and the “rom-com vibe” didn’t match the tone. “It just felt like I was trying to do too much narratively,” he said. Piper, no!

Mike White originally intended that ending to be even more tragic, with Rick and Chelsea really solidifying their bond in a finale love scene. In a joint Variety interview (mostly devoted to how they’re not feuding, okay???), Aimee Lou Wood and Walton Goggins said they had a finale sex scene that showed just how much Rick threw away by returning to his revenge plot. “We designed the whole journey, even down to the fact that Chelsea gets on Rick in the first scene,” Wood said. “Then in the last episode, it was Rick picking Chelsea up. It was so, so delicate.” Goggins agreed, saying it was a scene about “two people who were free. It was this very long, suspended moment of these two people looking at each other. It was so powerful.”

Yes, it is possible for Jason Isaacs to talk about full-frontal nudity without bringing up Mikey Madison’s vulva. When asked by self-described “peen-iatologist” and Jimmy Kimmel Live! guest host Tiffany Haddish about Tim’s exposed penis in episode four, Isaacs shared that his character had another “flashing” moment that got cut from the show. “It was funnier the second time, because the kids went, ‘Dad! Put it away!’’’ he recalled. “But the rest of the scene didn’t work. And I said, ‘Mike, you cut my second dick!’” Maybe White decided that we’d gotten enough scenes of Ratliff family members seeing one another naked?

This post has been updated.