All The ‘The White Lotus’ Season 3 Deleted Scenes

White revealed that after the Ratliffs’ only daughter loses her determination to live in a Buddhist monastery for a year, she decides to experience a sexual awakening instead.

Speaking to hosts Jia Tolentino and Josh Bearman about the show’s Season 3 finale, the show creator explained that he was “very disappointed” in the decision to cut the storyline.

“She decides to lose her virginity in the script in the last episode,” White said.

“She actually has sex with Zion,” White said. “There’s this whole scene where she’s like, ‘It’s true. Saxon is right about this one thing. I need to get this over with.’ And you know how after she leaves the monastery she’s just like, ‘I need to have sex.’”

Ultimately, White felt the season’s final episode, which ran 90 minutes, was already too long.

“It would have added 10 minutes to the thing. And it had a little bit of a romantic rom-com vibe in the middle of trying to kill the family with the pong pong fruits,” White continued. “It just felt like I was trying to do too much narratively.”

Laurie’s backstory involving her family

In a March interview with Harper’s Bazaar, actor Carrie Coon revealed that a storyline involving her character Laurie was trimmed from the final cut.

Laurie, in the season, reveals she is divorced and has a child. But there’s more to the story.

“There was a bit more context to her home life. You originally found out that her daughter was actually non-binary, maybe trans, and going by they/them,” Coon explained. “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 cut because White felt he didn’t have enough space to explore it thoroughly, Coon said.

“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,” she said.

Another sweeter side to Saxon

Reflecting on his character Saxon Ratcliff’s story arc with Variety, Patrick Schwarzenegger shared how a different take on the conclusion for Season 3 played out for his character.

Throughout the latest season of the HBO series, viewers watch Saxon pine over Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood).

“It’s longing. Over the last two episodes, he starts to form a more meaningful relationship with Chelsea,” Schwarzenegger explained. “She opens him up by giving him books, and he’s exposed to the fact that she believes Rick is her soulmate. She’s really in love, and Saxon doesn’t understand that. He’s always laughing or scoffing at that those things, but he watches her actually run off into the sunset and jump into Rick’s arms. They have this moment, forehead to forehead, and he thinks, ‘Wow. Maybe this is what I want.’”

“I actually played a version of that scene where it’s full come-to-Jesus, where Saxon is just so sweet to the girls,” he continued. “Mike came up and said, no, he didn’t want me to play it like that. He didn’t want some huge change for Saxon yet — just a small moment and to hold on my face as I watch her go off into the distance.”

Jaclyn had a lot more to prove on that night out

In Season 3, Episode 5 of “The White Lotus,” the season’s trio of girl pals, Kate (Leslie Bibb), Laurie and Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) head to a club with the resort’s employee Valentin and his friends.

During the night out, Jaclyn locks eyes in a tense across-the-dance-floor standoff with another group of women who appear to be jealous.

In an interview with Bustle, Monaghan explained that there had been more to the women’s story than what was ultimately aired.

“The three women that Jaclyn is dancing for — or at, however you want to (look at it) — were making fun of them earlier in the day at the bar when they first arrived because (Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie) all look like drowned rats from the Songkran Festival. They’re pointing fingers and laughing at them,” Monaghan explains of a cut moment from the show. “And Jaclyn was like, ‘Oh, hell no. We’re going downstairs.’”