Carrie Coon Explained Why A Scene About A Young Trans Character Was Cut From “The White Lotus” After Donald Trump Won The Election
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The hilariously awkward scene went incredibly viral and spawned a million different memes using Kate’s “I’m not going to tell you whether or not I voted for Trump” face (pictured below). And now, it turns out there was another layer of context behind the all-too-relatable scene that had to be cut after Trump won the presidential election in November 2024.
In a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Carrie Coon revealed that Laurie’s daughter — who we don’t meet in person but is described as somewhat wild — was “actually non-binary, maybe trans, and going by they/them.” In fact, Carrie said there was a filmed scene in which you “see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language.”
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“It was only a short scene,” she said, “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.”
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The entirety of Season 3 was written and filmed before the 2024 election, and Carrie explained that Mike White — the creator, writer, and director of The White Lotus — made the final decision to cut the scene where they discussed Laurie’s child due to Trump’s win and his subsequent attacks on trans people’s rights.
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“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.
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Despite having to make that cut, Carrie said elsewhere in the interview that she deeply appreciates Mike’s willingness to delve into “challenging cultural conversations” on the show.
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“That’s why it’s fun to watch Mike’s characters. They’re not just one thing,” Carrie said while discussing the dynamic between the characters in the viral Trump scene in Episode 3. “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.”
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