Mike White Talks about Cutting Laurie's 'Nonbinary Child' from 'White Lotus' Season 3

"White Lotus" star Carrie Coon made headlines earlier this week with the revelation that her character originally was portrayed as having a "nonbinary, maybe trans" child. Now Mike White has addressed why that was cut.

Talking about her hard-drinking character and the context she comes from – all relevant to the storyline of three longtime friends, Laurie (Coon), Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), and Kate (Leslie Bibb) vacationing together at the resort, with old tensions and resentments resurfacing – Coon told Harper's Bazaar that "more context" was provided as to Laurie's "home life" prior to the season's final editing.

"You originally found out that her daughter was actually nonbinary, maybe trans, and going by they/them," Coon said. "You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting."

"It was only a short scene, but for me, 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."

"But," Coon went on to add, "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 felt that the scene was so small and the topic so big that it wasn't the right way to engage in that conversation."

White picked up that thread in comments to The Hollywood Reporter, saying, "It felt right in March of last year. Now, there's a vibe shift."

"I don't think that it was radical," White went on to say, "but that's not the kind of attention I want. The politics of it could overwhelm whatever ideas I'm trying to talk about."

"And a lot of it was about time," the writer-director noted. "Every episode is bulging at 60 minutes... There's a lot of stuff that ended up being cut... I just needed to be hard on the material. As a writer, I got a little indulged. The episodes were coming in at an hour and 40 minutes, and HBO was like, 'Yeah ... you need to figure out how to shape it.'"

So, there you have it: The moment wasn't right for Laurie's "nonbinary, maybe trans" child. Maybe next season.

Season 3 of "The White Lotus" concludes this Sunday, April 6.