Okay, so we all survived the White Lotus season finale even though our beloved Rick and Chelsea did not. And now, White Lotus cast members and the creator/writer/director, Mike White, are revealing what scenes were cut from the final episode. Sam Nivola said there was a different version of his near-death that he filmed in a body bag, for example. But there's another cut scene with Piper that has my jaw literally on the floor. On the official HBO White Lotus podcast, White just revealed there was initially a scene where Piper lost her virginity to... drumroll please... ZION.
"The part that was cut, too, is that she decides to lose her virginity, in the script, in the last episode, and she actually has sex with Zion," White said. "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.
"But it was just one of these things that, the finale is an hour and a half already and it would have added ten minutes to the thing. And it had a little bit of rom-com vibe in the middle of trying to kill the family with the pong-pong fruits. It just felt like I was trying to do too much narratively."
This is absolutely wild. It does give a little more context to Piper's change after her stay at the monastery. She's dressing differently and she's already made a confession that she really does love the material things in life. But apparently that wasn't the only change she made after her brief flirtation with Buddhism.
It also creates a nice contrast between her and Saxon. At the beginning of the season, Saxon is driven by his desire for sex while Piper is more spiritual and thinks she's above him. By the end of the season, they've basically flip-flopped.
"At the end when they're on the boat, she's just thinking about how she got nicely fucked and Saxon's reading his self-help book. It's a reversal," White said.
I will be thinking about this for the rest of time. And if anyone has any footage of this scene, please feel free to send it my way. For research purposes, obviously.
