‘The White Lotus’ removed non-binary character following Donald Trump’s election win
HBO is facing backlash after The White Lotus star Carrie Coon revealed that the broadcaster chose to edit out a non-binary character in the show after Donald Trump’s election win last November.
In this year’s season of Mike White’s celebrated show, Coon plays Laurie, a lawyer and single mother who travels to the lavish resort in Thailand with her two childhood friends, Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Kate (Leslie Bibb).
They are full of repressed resentments toward each other, which boil over for the first time in episode three when Kate, who is usually the peacemaker of the group, refuses to confirm or deny that she voted for Trump, much to the horror of her friends.
In a recent interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Coon revealed that this scene, which went viral as it was, initially had more of an impact due to a certain aspect of Laurie’s backstory. “You originally found out that her daughter was actually non-binary, maybe trans, and going by they/them,” she said. “You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting.”
The scene was written before the 2024 election and before Trump focused his campaign on gender. When he accepted the nomination in January, he announced that it would be government policy that there are only two genders.
“When the time came to cut the episode down, Mike [White] felt that the scene was so small and the topic so big that it wasn’t the right way to engage in that conversation,” Coon explained, adding that the series creator has never shied away from “challenging cultural conversations.”
Regardless of his reasons, she voiced her disappointment about the decision. “It was only a short scene,” she said, “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.”
The White Lotus has drawn intense attention during its third season and will no doubt continue to do so after its eighth and final episode airs next week. However, until now, most of the conversations about the show have revolved around on-screen drama rather than anything behind the scenes.
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