The White Lotus fans might be surprised to know just how many scenes were cut before they could see the light of day.
HBO’s hit series, which debuted in 2021, focuses on the guests and employees at a fictional resort as they experience a slew of personal ups and downs while on vacation. The anthology series is also known for including a mysterious death — or two — that gets solved by the end of each season.
While The White Lotus often goes viral for its out of the box dialogue, crazy story lines and entertaining plot twists, not everything that was filmed made it on screen. Stars Murray Bartlett, Sabrina Impacciatore, Carrie Coon and Michelle Monaghan have mentioned unseen moments that offered more backstory to their characters. Luke Gage, meanwhile, revealed a potential cameo that didn’t pan out.
According to creator Mike White, part of the fun is not planning too far ahead. “This is, like, my dream gig,” he told The New Yorker in February 2025. “Because I can burn down the house at the end of every season and start building again.”
Keep scrolling for a comprehensive guide to each deleted scene:
A Moment of Intimacy
“We designed the whole journey, even down to the fact that Chelsea gets on Rick in the first [love] scene. Then in the last episode, it was Rick picking Chelsea up. It was so, so delicate,” Wood told Variety in June 2025. “The last one [sex scenes] was two people who were free. It was this very long, suspended moment of these two people looking at each other. It was so powerful.”
Goggins jokingly yelled a message for creator Mike White, saying, “F*** you, Mike! We want a director’s cut!”
A Missing Sex Scene
Sarah Catherine Hook, Nicholas Duvernay. Fabio Lovino/HBO(2)
Sarah Catherine Hook‘s Piper was going to lose her virginity to Belinda’s son, Zion before time constraints.
“That part was cut too, which is very disappointing, is that she decides to lose her virginity in the script in the last episode,” White shared on a podcast in April 2025. “And she actually has sex with Zion. There’s this whole scene where she’s like, ‘It’s true. Saxon is right about this one thing. I need to get this over with.’”
The scene was meant to happen after Piper left the monastery in Thailand following her overnight stay alongside brother Lochlan (Sam Nivola).
“After she leaves, she’s just like, ‘I need to have sex,’” White recalled. “But in the end, it was one of these things where it was like, it’s already an hour and a half. It would have added 10 minutes to the thing.”
White added: “It had a little bit of a 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.”
Elsewhere in the episode, Piper and Lochlan shared a conversation that never aired.
“There was a whole scene that was missing where she’s talking about the family being like a cult in and of itself, like she’s having all of these realizations about her family,” the actress told TV Insider. “It’s not the meditation center [that’s a cult], it’s the family … we’ve gotta fix the family, and then I’m saying … ‘It’s like borderline incestuous.’”
She continued: “I understand why [Mike] took it ouT. I actually appreciated the way that it ended. But there are so many things going on in [Piper’s] head where she’s like, ‘I’m feeling uncomfortable in this place. Now my brother wants to come with me … We are too close. I have so many things that need to be fixed right now. And I’m trying to find answers in Thailand, and that’s just not the case.’”
Key Chelsea Moments
Aimee Lou Wood and Walton Goggins. Fabio Lovino/HBO
Based on the trailer, there was a sex scene between Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) and Rick (Walton Goggins) that got cut — in addition to a still showing Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) carrying Chelsea in his arms.
Laurie’s Family
Coon revealed more details about her season 3 character’s personal life, telling Harper’s Bazaar in March 2025, “You originally found out that her daughter was actually nonbinary, maybe trans, and going by they/them. You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting.”
Despite the unaired context, Coon praised White for handling his characters with nuance.
“They’re not just one thing. His father wrote a very influential book about what it was like to come out as a gay man himself in the evangelical church as an adult, which a lot of young men have read and was a very meaningful text for them in their own journeys,” Coon added. “So Mike doesn’t shy away from challenging cultural conversations, and I really appreciate that about his work.”
Coon mentioned in a separate interview that the girls’ trip story line also featured a dream scene.
An Explanation for Jaclyn’s Behavior
According to Monaghan, Jaclyn’s “pick-me” behavior at the club stemmed from a deleted season 3 moment.
“The three women that Jaclyn is dancing for — or at, however you want to [look at it] — were making fun of them earlier in the day at the bar when they first arrived because [Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie] all look like drowned rats from the Songkran Festival,” she told Bustle in March 2025. “They’re pointing fingers and laughing at them … and Jaclyn was like, ‘Oh, hell no. We’re going downstairs.’”
A Shocking Cameo
“Fred [Hechinger] and I did a scene for season 2. 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,” Gage told The Hollywood Reporter in 2023. “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. And now for season 3, I’m literally writing Mike every day like, ‘Hey, remember me!’”
Valentina’s Past Obstacles
“In the first days, I was just following Mike’s indications without really understanding where he wanted to bring me,” Impacciatore, who starred on season 2, told Variety in December 2022. “But he wanted to explore with me, and 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. So I invented a backstory about a husband who was abusive to her. I created everything I could to get close to her process.”
Impacciatore worked off the content — even though it didn’t air.
“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,’” the actress recalled. “But Mike White is a genius — with just a little touch, he can make you understand something deep about a character and about life itself.”
Armond’s Backstory Before ‘The White Lotus’
Season 1’s Bartlett told Variety in 2021 that Armond spoke to Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) about always wanting to be an actor. That revelation ultimately guided how Bartlett approached his job as hotel manager.
