As the dust still settles on that dramatic season finale, The White Lotus fans are now getting all the spicy details about everything that didn’t make the cut — and turns out this includes a surprise sex scene featuring our resident Buddhist, Piper Ratliff (Sarah Catherine Hook).
Spilling the tea after the finale aired on Monday, creator Mike White revealed the script originally included a major moment of Piper having sex for the first time. It’s a callback to pretty early in the season, when her brother Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) creepily called her out for being a virgin.
According to White, the sex scene between Piper and none other than Zion (Nicholas Duvernay) AKA the business bro son of Belinda (Natasha Rothwell).
“She decides to lose her virginity, in the script, in the last episode, and she actually has sex with Zion,” White dished on the official HBO White Lotus podcast.
“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.”
Unfortunately, given the episode’s already-length run-time of 90 minutes — the longest in the three seasons of the show — White decided it just didn’t flow with the rest of the events to wrap things up.
“It was just one of these things that, the finale is an hour and a half already and it would have added 10 minutes to the thing,” he said. Plus, it threw in a “rom-com vibe in the middle of trying to kill the family with the pong-pong fruits” and I seriously feel him on that one.
“It just felt like I was trying to do too much narratively,” White admitted.
Still, Piper’s almost-sex-scene marks a hell of a reveal and in a way, it’s pretty fitting given all the ~sexual adventures~ the Ratliff clan have been up to in Thailand. I reckon it’s also a nice contrast between Piper and her horn-dog brother Saxon, who spent all season trying to get laid till he was finally inspired to dig a little deeper by his resort crush Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood).
So, as White pointed out, it’s like the siblings switched up in the finale, and you can see Piper loosen up to finally let her hair down.
“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.
Mulling over the revelation, The White Lotus podcast hosts Jia Tolentino and Josh Bearman agreed the finale reads a lot different for Piper when you’ve got this context — especially that conversation between Piper and Saxon back at the hotel which felt a little disjointed, TBH.
“So when she comes in, it’s like a piece of that conversation that was cut, because it doesn’t make sense anymore, and he’s like ‘you look different’ and she’s like ‘what are you reading?'” White explained.
Season three ended with our girl coming to terms with who she is, accepting she might be a bit more spoiled than she’d liked to admit. And, in a big move for self-development, she seems to cop to the fact that she’s only human and not more superior to her siblings.
“You can tell, when she comes back [from the monastery] she stops dressing like Wendy from Peter Pan,” Tolentino added.
Speaking at a cast Q&A led by Tan France after the finale, Hook broke down her character Piper’s switch-up, joking she might finally let loose and “be a hoe” now that she’s given up on plans to study at a Buddhist temple for a year.
“I was like, ‘She’s so earnest.’ And I feel like she put her whole life into it. And then you were like, ‘Oh. I guess she is her mother’s daughter,'” Hook said of her character’s revelation to go home. And, in something that’ll probably make her on-screen mum Victoria Ratliff (Parker Posey), she added Piper probably “also needs a Lorazepam right now.”
Elaborating on the moment she read Piper’s character flip, Hook said the realisation she’s just a little rich girl is “quite loaded”.
“I was like, ‘Wow. Everyone in this episode really came to some enlightenment.’ And she’s trying to get enlightened the whole time. And then she’s like, ‘No. I guess I’m spoiled’,” she said, per PEOPLE.
To learn more about all the ~tea~ from The White Lotus finale, you can check out the podcast here:
The post The White Lotus Finale Cut A Piper / Zion Sex Scene That Was Giving ‘Rom-Com Vibes’ appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
