7 White Lotus Deleted Scenes That The Cast Has Revealed

After several seasons, it’s become a pretty well-known fact that The White Lotus films a lot more than what makes it to air. Though each season has gotten a progressively larger episode count, the HBO vacation drama’s cast and crew has only gotten more open about the telling backstories and fun cameos that had to be left on the cutting room floor. Here are all the deleted scenes that we know about.

Although The White Lotus episodes do get a full hour to tell their interconnected stories, that’s still not always enough for creator Mike White’s full vision. “I think the ‘Mike White cut’ is probably an hour and a half — sometimes even longer,” Season 3 star Leslie Bibb told The Hollywood Reporter.

White confirmed in the same interview that he has to remove a significant amount of footage from each episode to fit into the time constraints. “There’s a lot of stuff that ended up being cut. Not because it wasn’t cool, I just needed to be hard on the material,” White said. “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.’”

Over the seasons, some actors have opened up about exactly what didn’t make the final cut, and a lot of the deleted moments offer up new insight into the characters.

Season 3

1. Chelsea & Rick’s Money Imbalance & Drug Use

There were a lot more complications in Rick and Chelsea’s love story than were shown. Aimee Lou Wood told The Hollywood Reporter that not only was a romantic bedroom moment cut from the finale episode, but several conversations about the couple’s financial situation and drug use were also altered from the original script.

“Chelsea talked about things like his money more,” Wood said. “She’d be like, ‘Oh, it’s OK when you spend money, but not when I spend money,’ and he’s like, ‘Yeah, because it’s my money and you’re not my wife.’ And she’s like, ‘But we’re soulmates; that’s what you said in Cancun.’ And he says, ‘But we were on meth.’ There was way more like that, but it was cut because we can’t have anyone doubt, even for a second, that Chelsea loves Rick.”

2. Laurie’s Nonbinary Child

One character’s entire gender ended up being altered in Season 3. Carrie Coon revealed that her character Laurie’s unseen daughter Ellie was originally meant to be a nonbinary child, which would have further underscored her anger at learning her friend Kate possibly voted for Donald Trump. It was apparently Trump’s election that convinced White to decide against a fleeting mention of nonbinary people.

“The season was written before the election,” Coon said in a Harper’s Bazaar interview. “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.”

3. Piper & Zion’s Hookup

One of the most surprising Season 3 cuts involves a steamy hookup between two characters who never once interacted on the show.

“[Piper] decides to lose her virginity, in the script, in the last episode, and she actually has sex with Zion,” White revealed shortly after Season 3’s finale aired. “There’s a whole scene where she’s like, ‘It’s true, Saxon’s right about this one thing, I need to get this over with.’ After she leaves the monastery she’s like, ‘I need to have sex’ and she’s scoping the restaurant in the end.”

The storyline ended up being removed, as White decided its “rom-com vibe” didn’t fit in narratively with the rest of the Ratliff family’s more dire tone in the finale.

4. Kate’s Wild Dream

It sounds like Kate had a significant amount of screen time cut in Season 3. Bibb told The Hollywood Reporter that her character had an extremely over-the-top fantasy that didn’t get aired. “Kate had this insane dream sequence with the ladyboys and ping-pong and everything was glowing,” Bibb said. “It was also kind of like The Shining. There just wasn’t room for it.”

Coon hinted at even more deleted Kate moments in another interview, saying she had a monologue about pickleball in the finale that was also removed.

Season 2

5. Quinn & Dillon’s Return

The only original characters to return in Season 2’s Sicilian season were Tanya and Greg, but originally, two other Season 1 stars were also going to make an appearance. Lukas Gage revealed that his character Dillon and Fred Hechinger’s Quinn filmed a Season 2 scene that ended up being cut.

“Fred and I did a scene for Season 2,” Gage told The Hollywood Reporter. “When Jennifer [Coolidge’s character] is with the gays in Palermo, she originally opens a door in the villa and sees a shot of me doing drugs that turns out to be an illusion. It got cut because it didn’t work with the show, but I didn’t care because I got a free trip to the Four Seasons.”

6. Valentina’s Previous Marriage

Season 2’s resort manager, Valentina, was particularly closed off, but there was originally a scene that delved into a backstory that viewers never got to see.

“Some scenes we shot ended up being cut, including one about Valentina’s past where she says she was married once, to a man, but she wasn’t happy,” Sabrina Impacciatore said. “I invented a backstory about a husband who was abusive to her. I created everything I could to get close to her process.”

That’s not all — Impacciatore also revealed an uplifting moment of Valentina showing her support for her one-time rivals Mia and Lucia also didn’t make the final edit: “There was another scene that got cut where I finally go up to the sex workers and tell them, ‘I understand what you’re doing, and I stand for you girls.’”

Season 1

7. Armond’s Acting Ambitions

A key part to understanding Season 1 hotel manager Armond’s motivations ended up being removed from the show, although actor Murray Bartlett emphasized that it was something that informed how he played the character.

“There was a backstory that kind of fell away along the line, but it was something that was really helpful to me, that at some point, Armond revealed that he always wanted to be an actor,” Bartlett told Entertainment Weekly. “And so, he's a performer. That was one of the coolest things that I felt made so much sense for him is that he's in this role because he wants to perform. And that's what he does ... He loves this existence and his role, because it is his chance to be a performer. He's very good at it. He loves running a tight ship. He loves being in charge, being in control of all this stuff. But at the same time, some of these people are just horrible.”