‘The White Lotus’ season 3 finale cut Piper-Zion sex scene

The White Lotus ended with some surprises Sunday — as we always knew it would — but there’s at least one more thing that no one ever saw, because it was cut from the HBO series: a storyline in which Sarah Catherine Hook’s Piper hooked up with Nicholas Duvernay’s Zion.

Creator Mike White found it “very disappointing” that it didn’t make it to air, he revealed on The White Lotus Official Season 3 Podcast.

“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. 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.”

The reason it didn’t make into the extended finale was a simple case of timing.

“It’s an hour and a half already. And it would have added, like, 10 minutes to the thing,” White 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.”

There was a lot that needed to be tied up in that final episode of the HBO series about tourists at various exotic resorts. Among others, this season’s cast included Hook’s Piper and her family: dad Timothy (Jason Isaacs), mom Victoria (Parker Posey), and brothers Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), and Lochlan (Sam Nivola). Natasha Rothwell‘s Belinda, whom the audience met as a spa manager in the show’s first season, was back, too, in a different locale. Duvernay, who played her son, was there in time to help his mom deal with a potentially life-threatening problem. He and Piper weren’t even close to a sexual encounter in the final version of the Emmy-winning series.

White said, too, that the moment when Piper rejoins her family and was told by her brother, “You look different,” while he was reading a self-help book was meant to show something had shifted.

“At the end, when they’re on the boat,” White said, “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.”

Hook revealed additional cuts. “There was this really funny bit with Piper that [White] made,” Hook said at a cast event at the Four Seasons resort in Westlake Village, Calif., on Sunday night. “And we filmed it, where every episode, if you remember in episode 2 where she’s doing yoga and the guy looks at her, he’s all creepy, and she’s like, ‘Ew.’ There was an encounter like that in almost every episode, and it didn’t make it, but I thought it was so funny in the scripts of just a guy checking her out. She’s like, ‘Ew.'”

Jon Gries, the actor who played Greg/Gary, reminded her that it was always a bald guy.

“A bald guy was always checking her out,” Hook said at the event presented in part by Ketel One Vodka and Tanqueray Gin. “Always a bald guy checking her out. And I just thought it was funny, because it was just, ‘Is it in her head? Is it real?'”

All episodes of the third season of The White Lotus are available on Max.