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Apparently, Mike White deleted a major plot point from the season finale of The White Lotus. Spoiler warning: This story contains spoilers for The White Lotus Season 3. During an April 6 episode of HBO’s The White Lotus Official Season 3 Podcast, White revealed that he cut a sex scene between Piper Ratliff and Zion Lindsey that was originally scripted for the finale episode.
“The part that was cut ... is that [Piper] decides to lose her virginity, in the script, in the last episode, and she actually has sex with Zion,” White revealed on the podcast.
In that version of the script, Piper decides to have sex after realizing that spending a year in Thailand is not for her. “There’s a whole scene where she’s like, ‘It’s true, Saxon’s right about this one thing, I need to get this over with.’ After she leaves the monastery she’s like, ‘I need to have sex’ and she’s scoping the restaurant in the end.”
However, White ultimately decided against including the scene. “But it was just one of these things that, the finale is an hour-and-a-half already, and it would have added 10 minutes to the thing,” he said.
White also felt the sex scene might distract from the rest of the Ratliff storyline. He added, “It had a little bit of romantic, 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.”
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According the White, the deleted sex scene did add a fun twist to the Ratliffs’ final scene, juxtaposing Piper and Saxon’s journeys. “At the end when they’re on the boat, she’s just thinking about how she got nicely f*cked and Saxon’s reading his self-help book. It’s a reversal,” White said.
Sarah Catherine Hook, who played Piper in the show, also alluded to this cut sex scene. During a Q&A after a finale screening event at the Four Seasons Westlake Village on April 6, Hook discussed the scene where Piper admits she’s “spoiled” and can’t see herself staying in the monastery.
“I actually love it, though. I think it’s so brilliant,” she said about her character’s realization in a video of the event posted to Instagram. “It’s so funny. It’s so good. I couldn’t be happier for her, really. I’m ready for her to be a ho now. So let’s go. Make it happen. No, I’m kidding. I don’t know. I’m being a troll.”
