The White Lotus Cut A Nonbinary Character From Season 3 — Here’s Why
There was a political reason for the big change.
Reflections on gender have been a central theme in Season 3 of The White Lotus. Between Lochlan’s tug-of-war between masculinity and femininity and Frank’s intense monologue about identifying as an Asian woman, many of the vacationers are coming to terms with the spectrum of sexuality and identity during their Thai getaway. And apparently, the season was going to delve even further into this topic with a nonbinary character... until the gender of that role was changed in the final edit.
Carrie Coon, who plays the work-obsessed lawyer Laurie, revealed that her character’s child was originally written to be nonbinary. However, the unseen offspring is referred to as her daughter, who uses she/her pronouns, in the HBO series. As Laurie and her frenemies Kate and Jaclyn reveal in a few conversations, her daughter’s name is Ellie, and she’s going through a difficult time at college.
Coon said there was a “short scene” in the initial script where Laurie disclosed her child’s gender to her friends. “You originally found out that her daughter was actually nonbinary, maybe trans, and going by they/them,” Coon said in a March 28 Harper’s Bazaar interview. “You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting.”
Although the gender of Laurie’s kid doesn’t have a huge impact on the plot, Coon did think that having a nonbinary child would have made Laurie’s reaction to a key Episode 3 moment a lot more layered. “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,” Coon said, pointing to the early-season hint about how her longtime friend may have voted.
But Ellie’s gender wound up being changed by series creator Mike White. Coon said the reason for this was in response to Donald Trump’s gender essentialist policies.
“The season was written before the election,” Coon said. “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 felt that the scene was so small and the topic so big that it wasn’t the right way to engage in that conversation.”
