Spoilers below for the season 3 finale of The White Lotus.
While the Ratliff family will face the biggest changes of their lives when they get home from Thailand, Piper Ratliff (Sarah Catherine Hook) already had a life-altering experience on the trip. After an overnight stay with Buddhist monks, she realized that life in the monastery is not for her and came to terms with her own materialism.
Apparently, in the original finale script, that wasn’t Piper’s only big moment in the episode; she also had sex for the first time. Series creator Mike White explained in a bonus episode of The White Lotus’s official podcast that Piper and her oldest brother, Saxon (Patrick Schwarezenegger), had a slight reversal of values over the course of the season. Saxon, of course, started off the series as a sex-obsessed jock before exploring spirituality at the end of the show, thanks to Chelsea.
While conceptualizing the Ratliff siblings, White was interested in the idea where one of them (Saxon) is “carnal” and “not only just exists that way, but actually has a philosophy around it, which is like, you want to get pussy, the pleasures of life are very basic. And life is about wanting things and getting them. And if you can get them, then you’re going to be happy.” He added, “A lot of times people who retreat from life [like Piper] are just afraid that they’re not going to be able to get the things they want, or they say they don’t actually want the things they want.”
He compared both characters in the context of Buddhism, which encourages people to “renounce things, because wanting things is suffering. And so it’s just two different arguments: Somebody who’s like, ‘I want to retreat to the monastery, not have any desires, and that’s gonna be the better way to live this life.’ And then another one who’s calling them on and saying, ‘You’re just afraid to have sex, you’re afraid to do this...don’t run away from life.”
White then revealed Piper was supposed to have a sex scene. “The part that was cut too, which is very disappointing, is that 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.”
He added, “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 just like, ‘I need to have sex.’ And she’s scoping the restaurant.” But ultimately the scene felt excessive in the episode. “You know, it’s an hour and a half already, and it would have added like 10 minutes to the thing,” White explained.
It was tonally off as well, he said: “It had a little bit of a romantic rom-com vibe in the middle of, you know, trying to kill the family with the pong pong fruits....It just felt like I was trying to do too much narratively.”
He also addressed Piper’s change in style, revealing another deleted scene in which Saxon reacts to her dressing less conservatively. “When she comes in, there’s a piece of that conversation that was cut because it doesn’t make sense anymore. And he’s like, ‘You look different.’ She’s like, ‘What book are you reading?’”
Still, Piper’s transformation is evident in the final shot of the three siblings on the boat, which did make the cut. “She has her hair down...she’s just thinking about how she got nicely fucked or whatever,” White said. “And he’s [Saxon] reading his self-help book. It’s this kind of reversal.”
Listen to the full podcast below:
