Carrie Coon Breaks Down Her Sprint in ‘The White Lotus’ Finale ArticlePure

Warning: This post contains spoilers for season 3, episode 8 of The White Lotus.

Carrie Coon knew there was no time to waste while filming the intense shootout on The White Lotus season 3 finale.

During the episode, Laurie (Carrie Coon) and her friends, Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Kate (Leslie Bibb), found themselves in harm’s way when Rick (Walton Goggins) opened fire on Sritala’s (Lek Patravadi) husband, Jim (Scott Glenn).

Fans were quick to notice that Laurie didn’t look back for her friends and made a mad dash to save herself.

Now, Coon, 44, is opening up about filming the viral running scene, telling Variety, “There wasn’t direction. I knew the gunshot was going to happen, and we were going to run into the bushes, essentially.”

The actress admitted that she drew from her own experience living in America, where there were 502 mass shootings last year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

“Look, I’m an American and I’m a New Yorker, and if you think I don’t know where the exits are in any building I’m in, then you’re not paying attention to the news,” she explained. “I thought, ‘What would a person do?’ A person would f—— run, would book it.”

She added, “I’m fast. I’m not as fast as I used to be!”

Beyond her own intense running, Coon also shared some advice for others on set.

“Some polite Thai workers were kind of scampering through in the background,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘No, no, you need to have some Americans sprinting and hitting the deck and jumping in the lagoon.’ The Americans are not playing. They know what this means!”

This is not the first time that Coon has been noticed for her running. The actress was runner at University of Mount Union. She placed second at Ohio Athletic Conference (OAC) Championships in 2000 after completing the 400 meters in 59.36 seconds, which was first reported by Runner’s World.

Coon also opened up about the women’s reaction to the shooting on the boat ride home. 

“I love that, because Stephanie Wenger Mike [White] was very specifically looking for, Jaclyn’s having an emotional [experience]. She’s processing it,” she shared. “And Laurie is there to be practical, and help her. And then he just gave Kate this moment of contemplation. We don’t really know what’s going on there.” 

She went on to praise her costar Bibb’s performance, saying, “Leslie’s performance across the season was so nuanced, so specific and funny, I’m glad that she got that final frame. But there was Jaclyn, I think, probably making it about her.”

Executive producer David Bernad previously revealed he and White had a backup plan to make sure the show’s shocking ending was kept secret.

“We have fake endings to the scripts,” he told PEOPLE. “So we wrote up — we have six different endings — and we kind of distributed fake endings to people just in case someone leaked anything, and then we could say there’s different fake endings.”

“And then when we shot the ending scene, it’s a locked down set,” he continued. “So no one really has access to what we were shooting and there would be no non-White Lotus participants ever seeing what we’re doing.”

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The White Lotus season 3 is streaming on Max.