The third season of HBO's The White Lotus hasn't shied away from depicting our dark moment in American politics, but there was one story element that proved a bridge too far, it seems.
In an interview with Harper's Bazaar, actor Carrie Coon said her character Laurie was supposed to have a nonbinary child with they/them pronouns. But the brief scene between her and her child was cut following Trump's election.
The scene was meant to bolster Laurie's shock and discomfort with the revelation that her friend and travel partner Kate, played by Leslie Bibb, voted for Trump.
Coon told the magazine that Laurie's own struggles with the nature of her child's gender identity figured more heavily, as well.
"You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting.”
That's certainly a poignant plot point for these times, when most white people know at least one person who shocked them with their vote last November—often under the influences of incessant right-wing propaganda about trans and nonbinary people.
As Coon went on to put it:
“It was only a short scene, but 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."
But the scene never made it to the final cut. After Trump's surprise win, it seems creator Mike White felt it would be doing LGBTQ+ people a disservice to delve into such poisoned waters.
Coon told Harper's Bazaar:
“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."
Given the virality of The White Lotus and the tons of discourse it provokes each week, he's probably right that the scene would have created even more backlash towards an already beleaguered community, which has been the target of Trump's Executive Orders since taking office.
But plenty of people online feel that White's move was a pulled punch—and that now is a time when addressing these issues is more important than ever.
Given the hordes of slavering Trump fans applauding the decision as a triumph against "woke," it seems that both White and his critics are right to a degree. Sign of the times.
