The White Lotus Season 3 finale kept viewers on the edge of their seats with shocking twists and turns Sunday — but there’s one unexpected scene that didn’t make the final cut.
Creator Mike White revealed on The White Lotus Official Season 3 Podcast that Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) was originally meant to hook up with Zion (Nicholas Duvernay) in a scene he found “very disappointing” to cut.
Videos by PopCulture.com
“She decides to lose her virginity in the script in the last episode. And she actually has sex with Zion, which is Belinda’s son,” White explained. “So she’s like, you know, 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.’ And after she leaves the monastery, she’s just, like, ‘I need to have sex.’ And she’s scoping the restaurant in the end.”
White continued that the scene ultimately didn’t make it into the finale due to nothing more than timing. “[The finale is] an hour and a half already. And it would have added, like, 10 minutes to the thing,” he said. “And it had a little bit of a romantic, rom-com vibe in the middle of like, you know, trying to kill the family… It just felt like I was trying to do too much narratively.”
Fans might have been shocked to see a love scene between Piper and Zion in the finale, as the duo didn’t have any inkling of any kind of romance during the final version of the season, but White said Piper losing her virginity would have served as a nice bookend to her storyline with sex-obsessed brother Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger).
In the finale, Piper rejoins her family and is told she looks “different” by her older brother, who has had somewhat of a spiritual awakening of his own and is reading a self-help book. “At the end, when they’re on the boat,” White explained, “She’s just thinking about how she got nicely f—ed or whatever. And he’s reading his self-help book, and it’s this kind of reversal.”