Now that the dust has settled from HBO’s The White Lotus third season finale, creator Mike White is getting candid about the show’s Emmy-winning composer announcing he’s quitting the show.
Talking to Howard Stern on Tuesday, White was asked about composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer saying he’s not returning for the HBO drama’s fourth season after feuding with White over show’s score. The composer told The New York Times last week that he is exiting the show, saying, “We already had our last fight forever.”
“I honestly don’t know what happened, except now I’m reading his interviews because he decides to do some PR campaign about him leaving the show,” White said. “I don’t think he respected me. He wants people to know that he’s edgy and dark and I’m, I don’t know, like I watch reality TV. We never really even fought. He says we feuded. I don’t think I ever had a fight with him — except for maybe some emails. It was basically me giving him notes. I don’t think he liked to go through the process of getting notes from me, or wanting revisions, because he didn’t respect me. I knew he wasn’t a team player and that he wanted to do it his way. I was thrown that he would go to The New York Times to shit on me and the show three days before the finale. It was kinda of a bitch move.”
White added that he struggled with de Veer during the first two seasons. “By the time the third season came around, he’d won Emmys and he had his song go viral, he didn’t want to go through the process with me, he didn’t want to go to sessions. He would always look at me with this contemptuous smirk on his face like he thought I was a chimp or something … he’s definitely making a big deal out of a creative difference.
Stern marveled: “You’re the genius behind this thing. Why quit a hit show because you got some notes and some differences? Just work it out.”
White replied, “He is very talented. [But] I’ve never kissed somebody’s ass so hard to just get him to — to lead that horse to water. Have fun with whatever you’re doing next.”
In the Times story, de Veer said, “Maybe I was being unprofessional, and, for sure, Mike feels that I was always unprofessional to him because I didn’t give him what he wanted. But what I gave him did this, you know — [won] those Emmys, people going crazy [for the show]… That is the main thing that I’m most happy about — it was worth all the tension and almost forcing the music into the show, in a way, because I didn’t have that many allies in there … This was a good struggle.”
With season three having broken ratings records for the series, White also revealed he’s currently renegotiating his HBO deal ahead of the show’s fourth season, while Stern pressed him on how much money he’s going to make.
“We are renegotiating right now, I’m definitely curious to find out what that [amount] is,” White said. “I feel like I have financial security for sure … at a certain point with money, [you wonder]: ‘Is this going to make me worse?’ Is having more money just going to make me more dysfunctional?”
Stern, of course, also pressed White on infamous “incest handjob” between Patrick Schwarzenegger and Sam Nivola’s sibling characters and the creator admitted that, to some degree, he was indeed trying to generate some shock and attention for the show.
“In the show, it’s a trope where gay sex is like a jump scare,” he said. “I just felt like we had to build a trope. We had done faux incest [in season two, where two characters turned out not to be related], so maybe we should do real incest. Beyond the shock of it, just to have a character like Patrick[‘s Saxon], who’s all about getting off and just thinks of sex in base terms, what would need to happen to him to where he’d suddenly have to pull the brakes on the way he’s thinking? I was trying to think of a way that would be integral to his character. But it would be a talking point for sure. Once we cast Patrick and Sam [and they saw the script], I told them, ‘You guys can still get out of this, you’re going to be the face of gay incest.’”
White also said he’s been reading all the finale coverage and has been angsting a bit over the (relatively modest) criticisms out there.
“They’re criticizing the show in certain ways and they’re meaner in certain ways [now that the show is popular],” White said. “I’m used to being this underdog indie writer that people are championing. Certain things will hurt my feelings or I’ll feel misunderstood. The mean ones have gotten meaner. It’s like they don’t like me. I guess I need to either avoid that stuff or get tougher, because it does bum me out.”
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The White Lotus season two is now streaming on Max. Head here for all of THR’s season three coverage, including our uncensored oral history with White and the cast, breakdown of the finale and finale interviews with Jon Gries, Aimee Lou Wood and Scott Glenn.