Carrie Coon Reveals A Transgender Storyline Was Erased From ‘The White Lotus’
Director Mike White cut the storyline from the show after the presidential election, according to Coon.
In a recent interview with Harper’s Bazaar, actress Carrie Coon revealed that her White Lotus character, Laurie, was originally meant to have a “nonbinary, maybe trans” child. Coon said the scenes mentioning the gender identity of her child were cut from the show, following Donald Trump’s election into office.
Coon’s character plays an essential role in the classic trope of a friendship ‘trio’ turned messy. Her aversion to Kate, played by Leslie Bibb, voting for Trump may be a familiar taste to some, but there was something more to that scene besides Laurie’s twisted expression. The White Lotus fans, however, did not understand the true depth of the scene until now.
“You originally found out that her daughter was actually non-binary, 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,” she said about the original context of the scene. “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 noted that the season was written before the 2024 presidential election. While making final edits to the season, director Mike White took into consideration the way the Trump administration has waged a cultural war against transgender people. When it came time to cut down the episode, Mike felt that “the scene was so small and the topic was so big that it wasn’t the right way to engage in that conversation.”
Though the plotline of Laurie’s nonbinary or transgender child was scrapped, Coon still spoke in favor of White. “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 … so Mike doesn’t shy away from challenging cultural conversations, and I really appreciate that about his work.”
