If there is anywhere to find the White Lotus deleted scenes from season three, we would like to see them. Season three had one more episode than season two and a finale runtime of an hour and a half, but, believe it or not, there were still several scenes left on the cutting room floor. And, to be honest, we kind of feel like we missed out. Do they do director’s cuts for television shows? Because they should.
So, here are some of the White Lotus deleted scenes from the series’s third season, according to the actors. Spoilers ahead!
A final Rick and Chelsea scene.
Ah, our poor, star-crossed, age-gap lovers. According to Aimee Lou Wood, who plays Chelsea, there were actually a lot of Rick and Chelsea scenes that didn’t make it to the final cut of the show, but one in particular stands out. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Wood revealed that in the final episode, there was one last moment between the couple that audiences missed.
“There was a scene where they’re back in the bedroom, and she asks him if he did anything bad, and he says no, and she knows that he’s telling the truth and she’s very happy and joyful,” Wood said. “And then she says, ‘This year’s my Saturn return, so it’s either going to be the best or the worst year, and I think it’s going to be the best, don’t you?’ And he says, ‘I do.’ And then he picks her up and he kisses her and he puts her on the bed.”
But, Wood added, she understands why the scene, though beautiful, had to be cut. “If we’d had that, then the scene where he says, ‘That’s the plan’ wouldn’t have been as special.”
Kate, Jackie, and Laurie’s conversations about pickleball and beans.
According to Carrie Coon, who plays Laurie, there were also several moments between the three blonde friends that ended up on the cutting room floor, including one in which Kate (Leslie Bibb) goes on an extended discussion of pickleball. “Most of the scenes with the women were some of the longest in the scripts,” Coon told The Unwrapped Podcast. “[Bibb] had a whole monologue about pickleball,” Coon shared, “And a whole dream sequence of Kate that never made it to air.”
One moment between the women that did make it onto the show, the discussion of beans, was actually a much longer and highly improved bit when originally filmed, Coon said. “Mike just let the bean stuff — he was like, ‘And now Laurie, say you love medium beans!’ He just wanted more beans in prestige TV.”
Piper losing her virginity to Belinda’s son Zion.
If it weren’t for the already 90-minute runtime, the season three finale episode might have included Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) losing her virginity to Belinda’s son Zion (Nicholas Duvernay). The fact that the scene had to be scrapped was “very disappointing” to show creator and director Mike White. Plus, White said on The White Lotus Official Podcast, “It had a little bit of a romantic rom-com vibe in the middle of [Timothy] trying to kill the family with the pong pong fruits.”
The idea behind the scene was that Piper, in addition to proving her mother right with her disappointment about the monastery, had also taken it to heart when her brother Saxon mocked her for being a virgin in an earlier episode. “She’s like, ‘It’s true, Saxon’s right about this one thing, I need to get this over with,’” White said on the podcast. “After she leaves the monastery, she’s just like, ‘I need to have sex.’”
Laurie has a non-binary child.
Back in March, Coon told Harper’s Bazaar that her character, Laurie, was written to have a non-binary child who used they/them pronouns. “You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting,” Coon said. “It was only a short scene, 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.”
However, it was written before the election, Coon explained, which changed the political and cultural dynamics. “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.
Jim’s dying last word.
Jim Hollinger’s (Scott Glenn) last word to his son Rick (Walton Goggins) might have been very different. After Rick shoots Jim and kills him, Glenn told The Hollywood Reporter, there was one take where Glenn said a Thai word, “Buakaw,” which means “white lotus,” but is also the name of a famous Muay Thai athlete, Buakaw Banchamek. Glenn explained that the lotus is the main symbol of Thai Buddhism, and the White Lotus represents spiritual perfection, which is where he imagined his character got the name for the hotel.
“When I got to Thailand, one of the things I did in preparation for the part was to find something that would give me a rhythm of the country. So I studied two types of martial arts, one of which was Muay Baram, which is Muay Thai but without the gloves and with no rules,” Glenn explained. “[‘Buakaw’] wasn’t to Rick. It was kind of to Sritala. But it was more just to myself: the realisation that I’ve been shot, I’m dying. In my mind, part of Jim coming to Thailand had to mean he accepted Thai Buddhism.”
This article was originally published in GLAMOUR US.
