Piper, Zion Sex Scene Cut

Warning: This article contains major spoilers for the April 6 finale of The White Lotus.

What happens at the White Lotus resort doesn’t always stay at the White Lotus resort. 

In fact, White Lotus creator Mike White revealed that he wound up cutting a sex scene where Piper (played by Sarah Catherine Hook) lost her virginity to Zion (Nicholas Duvernay) from the HBO Max series’ season three finale, which aired on April 6. 

And the reason the pair’s rendezvous didn’t make it into the final episode wasn’t because the writer was opposed to the idea of Piper—who spent most of the third installment trying to convince her parents Timothy (Jason Isaacs) and Victoria (Parker Posey) to let her join a Buddhist monastery—doing the deed with the son of masseuse Belinda (Natasha Rothwell). 

As Mike—who also directed all of the show’s episodes—noted, the sex scene’s removal was “very disappointing.”

“It was just one of these things where it’s an hour and a half already,” he explained on the April 7 episode of The White Lotus Official Podcast, “and it would have added, like, 10 minutes to the thing.”