For “The White Lotus,” apparently gay incest was okay but possibly having a trans child with different pronouns was not.
In the new Harpers Bazaar, one my favorite actresses, Carrie Coon, reveals that sensitive material was tossed to the cutting room floor.
Coon reports that her character, Laurie, supposedly had a back story including a daughter at home going by they/them pronouns. She might have been trans. Laurie had to explain it to her friends — played by Michelle Monaghan and Leslie Bibb — and of course, they weren’t good with it.
Coon tells HB: “The season was written before the election. And 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 [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.”
It’s amazing that the graphically displayed sexual threesome involving two brothers passed muster, but this conversation did not. Is this why “White Lotus” feels so slow and dull this season? Very little happens (as we’ll see Sunday night) or otherwise feels timely or provocative. If only there had been more of this kind of thing instead of Jason Isaacs prolonged moping around.
Episode 7 airs tonight. I haven’t seen it, but the word is a little meh. Stay tuned…for 10pm and follow me on Twitter at @showbiz411.
PS Carrie Coon also plays Mrs. Russell on “The Gilded Age,” which will return soon. Mrs. Russell is a social climber extraordinaire, with little restraint at all.
