The current season of The White Lotus has featured some of the most jaw-dropping scenes and twists in the show’s history – but it turns out the third series could have been even more outrageous.

In an extensive new interview with the cast and crew published in The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday, showrunner Mike White admitted that there were several sequences from his original script that had to be cut for time.

“There’s a lot of stuff that ended up being cut. Not because it wasn’t cool, I just needed to be hard on the material,” he explained.

Mike admitted: “The episodes were coming in at an hour and 40 minutes, and HBO was like, ‘Yeah … you need to figure out how to shape it’.

“People are already like, ‘It’s too slow! Let’s go, let’s go! Nothing’s happening!’. But nothing happened in the first season. Literally. It was basically people sitting around eating meals, but the music gave this tension, and you knew something bad was going to happen.”

Earlier in the interview, Leslie Bibb revealed one deleted scene involved her character having an elaborate nightmare full of clichés about Thailand.

“Kate had this insane dream sequence with the ladyboys and ping-pong and everything was glowing,” she recalled.

“It was also kind of like The Shining. There just wasn’t room for it.”

The team recently opened up about another sequence that wound up on the cutting room floor, though this wasn’t for timing reasons.

Earlier this week, Carrie Coon shared that her character was initially supposed to disclose that her teenager was experimenting with their gender, and had begun using they/them pronouns, though this was eventually scrapped once Donald Trump was re-elected.

The White Lotus season three will come to an end this weekend, with the finale available to watch in the UK from Monday morning on Sky and Now.