Spoilers ahead for The White Lotus season 3 finale.
The White Lotus creator Mike White originally wrote a scene in the season 3 finale where Piper Ratliff (Sarah Catherine Hook), fresh off her life-changing monastery stay, lost her virginity to a surprising resort guest. But that wasn’t the only big Piper moment to be axed from the episode’s final 90-minute cut.
Sarah Catherine Hook revealed to TV Insider that after Piper and her little brother Lochlan’s (Sam Nivola) night at the monastery, they had a bigger conversation where incest came up. Lochlan, of course, infamously had a threesome with their big brother, Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) in episode 6.
Hook explained, “On the beach, do you know when she walks up to [Lochlan], and she’s like, ‘I don’t wanna mess up your life. Let me do that to my own’? There was a whole scene that was missing from that 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.
“She’s like, ‘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 too, ‘It’s like borderline incestuous.’ And he’s like, ‘Did he [Saxon] say something?’ It’s so funny.”
Hook admitted that she understood why White ultimately cut the conversation. “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. There’s no A/C here. I don’t like the food. I can’t live like this. I thought I could do it.’”
Watch her explain the deleted scene in full below:
