Two characters had sex in a scene that was dropped from the season three finale of The White Lotus due to timing issues, creator Mike White has revealed.
One of the key families during the season was the wealthy Ratliffes, which included brothers Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and Lochlan (Sam Nivola) as well as their sister Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) - and in several scenes, the brothers discussed whether their sister was still a virgin or not.
Fed up with the speculation, the original cut of the finale episode involved Piper deciding to have sex with Zion (Nicholas Duvernay), the son of Belinda (Natasha Rothwell).
Speaking on the show's official HBO podcast, White said: "She decides to lose her virginity in the script in the last episode. And she actually has sex with Zion.
"There's this whole scene where she's like, 'It's true. Saxon is right about this one thing. I need to get this over with'... After she leaves the monastery, she's just like, 'I need to have sex.'"
He continued: "In the end, it was one of these things where it was like, [the episode is] already an hour and a half. It would have added 10 minutes to the thing. And it had a little bit of a rom-com vibe in the middle of trying to kill the family with the pong pong fruits. It just felt like I was trying to do too much narratively."
White previously revealed that a trans subplot was dropped earlier in the season, albeit for editorial rather than timing reasons.
Neil Wilkes
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