The White Lotus star Carrie Coon took the high road in her spat with Meghan McCain, telling The Hollywood Reporter in a new oral history about the hit HBO show’s third season that she understands why the political divide between her character Laurie and Leslie Bibb’s Kate is resonating with conservatives.
“I do think people like Meghan McCain and her community are really gratified to see a conservative person on television,” Coon said. “I have conservative people in my life who reached out to me to say that was an awesome conversation, because I don’t think it vilifies Kate.”
Last month, Coon tweeted, “Who’s gonna tell her?” after McCain tweeted in support of President Donald Trump’s stated support for cancer treatment during his address to Congress. Two days later, McCain replied with the meme of Bibb’s Trump-loving character’s tight smile.
Then, when Sunday night rolled around, McCain posted that she couldn’t “decide if I should still watch White Lotus tonight since one of the stars decided to tweet some nasty crap at me.”
“Watch it anyway,” her fellow conservative podcast host Megyn Kelly replied. “Virtually every star in every movie and TV show hates conservatives, who could watch nothing if the prerequisite were: the ppl on screen could possibly like me or be like me.”
She evidently has not been watching Season 3 of The White Lotus or she would know that the Kate character is not only an unabashed Trump-supporter from Texas, but even looks alarmingly like Megyn Kelly.
Speaking to THR, Bibb said that the show’s creator Mike White “does have an uncanny ability to instantly be part of the zeitgeist,” adding “That’s what was amazing about the Trump scene.” When we filmed the scene before the results of the 2024 presidential election were known, Bibb recalled thinking to herself, “Is this going to feel dated by the time it airs?” And yet, it was all the more relevant given Trump’s win.
Similarly, Coon has discussed the decision to remove a scene from the season in which her character discusses having a trans, or possibly non-binary child.
“The Trump thing becomes much more offensive to Laurie because of her daughter, but this was before Trump was reelected and before this war on the trans community was escalated,” Coon elaborated in the oral history. “Mike felt that it was actually too political, or too far, or too distracting.”
“It felt right in March of last year. Now, there’s a vibe shift,” White added. “I don’t think that it was radical, but that’s not the kind of attention I want. The politics of it could overwhelm whatever ideas I’m trying to talk about.”
McCain, meanwhile, seems to have changed her tune about how dedicated Trump—and the Republican Party more broadly—is to the type of brain cancer treatment her father, the late Sen. John McCain, received near the end of his life.
After massive cuts to the National Institute of Health, McCain tweeted (and then deleted) a message that read, “My fellow republicans – this is wrong: I am absolutely heartbroken at the news the funding for brain cancer research has been completely cut from NIH.”
So it seems as though, in Coon’s original words, somebody finally told her.
