The season finale of The White Lotus was supposed to be even more shocking, the show’s creator revealed, because one character was going to lose their “virginity” at the Thailand resort.
Mike White revealed that Piper Ratliff (played by Sarah Catherine Hook) was originally written to have expressed her post-monastery epiphany by “losing her virginity”—to Belinda’s son, Zion (Nicholas Duvernary).
“The part that was cut, which is very disappointing,” White said on The White Lotus Official Podcast. “There’s a whole scene where she’s like, ‘It’s true… I need to get this over with,‘” he explained, noting that Piper’s brother Saxon hassles her about her lack of sexual experiences throughout the season. “After she leaves the monastery, she’s just like, ‘I need to have sex.‘”
Piper’s revelation that she wasn’t cut out for the life of a Buddhist monk was relegated to the meme-tastic breakfast conversation, in which she opines to her mother that the food isn’t organic and the monastery doesn’t have air conditioning—marking the end of her desire to break free from her life of privilege.
The moment certainly had an effect on social media, with some fans lauding Piper’s transformation as a realistic depiction of America’s privileged youth, but White was still disappointed the virginity scene didn’t make it in. “I was trying to do too much narratively,” he said, as the finale was already an hour and a half. The deleted scene “would have added, like, 10 minutes to the thing.”
The tone was also off in comparison to the events of the season’s last episode, White also explained. “It had a little bit of a romantic rom-com vibe,” he said. And in the middle of the family’s patriarch “trying to kill the family with the pong pong fruits,” it just didn’t make sense.
