Mike White’s first job as a television writer, in the late nineties, was on the teen soap opera “Dawson’s Creek.” It was a sentimental show, leavened by sharp, self-conscious dialogue; the titular character, Dawson Leery, was a film buff who worked at a video store, which meant that he could analyze the show’s various narrative devices at least as well as viewers could. One of White’s main tasks was to prolong the sense of romantic anticipation that sustained the show, and for a time he enjoyed solving this puzzle. But it didn’t last. “I quickly couldn’t keep interested,” he said recently. “I always, whether intentionally or not, started burning down the house.”
It was a sticky spring afternoon in Phuket, Thailand, and White had summoned a few dozen actors and a few hundred crew members from around the world to shoot the third season of “The White Lotus,” his acclaimed HBO series. The show, which began as a rushed pandemic project in Hawaii, has expanded into a globe-trotting franchise, with a new setting and array of characters for each incarnation. “This is, like, my dream gig,” White said. “Because I can burn down the house at the end of every season and start building again.”
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White is fifty-four, with pale skin, pale hair, and a nasal, hesitating voice that disguises an implacable determination to do things precisely the way he wants. For most of his career, he was known for what he calls “oddball character studies”—projects that were cerebral and a little weird. He wrote and starred in “Chuck & Buck,” an indie movie that drew a small crowd but left a big impression: Entertainment Weekly named it the year’s best film, and Roger Ebert called it “a fascinating study of behavior that violates the rules,” although his reviewing partner, Richard Roeper, likened the film to “spiders crawling on my arms.” White found broad success when he wrote “School of Rock,” the Jack Black movie, which inspired a children’s television show and a Broadway musical. His first HBO drama, “Enlightened,” delighted a narrower audience. In the show, Laura Dern played Amy Jellicoe, who was an inspiring crusader and a painful nightmare, sometimes in the same scene. It ran for two seasons before it was cancelled.
White specializes in characters who leave viewers unsure of how to feel about them, or about themselves. With “The White Lotus,” though, he has found a way to provide plenty of pleasure along with the pain. The show is both a social satire and a murder mystery, named for the fictional luxury hotel chain where it is set. People go to the White Lotus to be pampered, which means that the audience can feel pampered, too, watching glamorous characters talking through various trivial and existential crises. Each season begins with an unidentified corpse, giving viewers assurance that, by season’s end, a question will be settled, even if their feelings about the characters aren’t.
The first season, filmed at a Four Seasons in Maui and broadcast in 2021, was a barbed morality play about the ways that rich Americans make themselves at home in exotic locations. Unlike many pandemic-era projects, it felt bright and buoyant, earning an armful of awards and becoming HBO’s most streamed show. White followed up by discarding much of what fans loved. The second season, which he describes as “an Italian bedroom farce,” was set in Sicily, and its characters and plot were more exuberant: if Hawaii gave White a chance to skewer American hypocrisy, Sicily gave him a chance to escape it. Now, for the third season, he was again asking fans to transfer their loyalty to an almost entirely new show.
Though White finds these constant transformations enlivening, they put pressure on him: because the cast and the location and even the theme song keep changing, the show’s identity is its semi-satirical tone—that is, White’s tone. The new season begins with violent chaos; viewers expecting a comedy of manners get something that looks, instead, like an action movie. “It’s about death,” White told me. “But I also find it maybe the funniest season.” The plot came to him on a location-scouting trip, when he was struck with bronchitis and given a steroid nebulizer; kept awake by the medicine, he found himself imagining a group of Westerners who descend on Thailand in search of spiritual revival.
We were sitting in an air-conditioned hotel suite with a dramatic view of Patong Bay, where a cruise ship was slowly turning, on its way from Perth to Mumbai. White seemed too distracted to notice. By creating a hit series about luxury hotels, he has consigned himself to a life of upscale travel, and he had been in Thailand, off and on, for more than a year. He said that the whole process made him feel a bit like a con man: he had dreamed up a story, and now he had to bring it profitably to life. “I see myself as an indie weirdo who’s just backed into this,” he said. “I’m white-knuckling my way through.” Then he began to cry softly, which made him chuckle at his own sentimentality. (In a Mike White show, the sight of a director crying in front of a journalist would surely be presented as awkward comedy.) He said that he found it exhausting to be responsible for so many people—all those actors who had uprooted their lives and moved to Thailand—and that he wasn’t used to the pressure of commercial expectations. Yet people who know him say that he has always believed in his own ability to tell a great story. “Obviously, I don’t want to lay an egg,” he told me. “But I don’t think I’m going to.”
As an actor, White has often portrayed nebbishes and sneaks, so people who meet him are sometimes surprised to encounter a fit, energetic man with a fondness for protein shakes. In Thailand, he was wearing gray running shorts and On Cloud sneakers, as well as a wristband that kept track of his heart-rate variability and sleep regimen. He told me that he wanted to make sure he was at his best during the long, hot shoot, though he conceded that this was also an act of benevolent manipulation: he wanted the cast and crew to function at their best, too. “He’s always asking me how many grams of protein I ate, or what’s my H.R.V.,” Patrick Schwarzenegger, one of the stars of the new season, said during a break between scenes. Schwarzenegger is the son of the legendary action star, and also a fitness obsessive: he co-founded a company that makes protein bars. He said he had grown used to encountering White in the hotel gym at five in the morning.
Because White is an exacting and perceptive person, he knows how infuriating exacting people can be. In the first season, Jake Lacy and Alexandra Daddario played a honeymooning couple: Shane, a rich heir, and Rachel, a frustrated journalist who is increasingly uncertain that she has, in fact, married well. Shane spends most of the six episodes engaged in a spiralling dispute with the hotel’s disobliging manager over whether he has been given the suite he requested:
The undisputed fan favorite from that season was Jennifer Coolidge, who played a wealthy, woozy solo traveller named Tanya; she never seemed quite sure where she was or how she had got there. The role marked a career resurgence for Coolidge, and she was virtually the only actor who returned for Season 2. But she didn’t make the trip to Thailand. “I miss her a lot,” White said, without seeming to doubt his decision. Later, when I talked to Coolidge, she said, graciously, that she understood that her departure was a dramatic necessity: “I don’t think Tanya’s ever coming back, so I have to live with it.”
This year’s cast includes Parker Posey, playing an ostentatious matriarch with a toothsome Southern drawl. One afternoon during shooting, she was sitting at a table in the hotel restaurant, wearing a peach-colored cotton dress, swatting at the air, and singing a quiet song of her own invention: “Bug spray, bug spray, bug spra-a-a-ay.” White approached her to confer, and they traded requests: she asked him to scratch a spot on her back, and he asked her to angle slightly toward the camera. The scene also involved her character’s daughter, played with eye-rolling disdain by Sarah Catherine Hook, and the daughter’s father, who was evidently in some kind of trouble. Posey’s character wanted her daughter to understand that the dad, played by Jason Isaacs, really wasn’t so bad. He had his flaws, but he wasn’t some sort of lowlife or sexual predator. “You think men like that only exist in bad movies,” Posey said. “Turns out? They’re real.” White ducked in with a suggestion: perhaps Posey could say “They’re real” with rising intonation, as a verbal shrug?
White thinks of himself primarily as a writer, which means that he can’t help being attuned to the minutiae of the script. But actors he has worked with say that they think of him as a fellow-practitioner. At one point, he told Isaacs, “Hide it better.” He wanted Isaacs to carry on a normal conversation, trusting that the camera would find his eyes and allow him to show, with a minimal gesture, that something was terribly wrong. Isaacs said that he had learned to trust White. “He wants to shriek with laughter—sometimes at the most tragic things,” he said. “If you get a shriek from behind the monitor, you know two things. One, you’ve done something great. And, two, you might have to do it again, because he’s ruined the sound.”
White’s father, Mel, says that Mike was an unusually confident and clear-eyed boy. “Michael has never been ambivalent about anything,” he told me. When Mel tried to scold him, Mike would patiently pull him aside and say, “Dad, take it easy.” The family lived in Pasadena, and White got interested in theatre in the second grade, thanks to a teacher who happened to be Sam Shepard’s mother. His own mother, Lyla, later worked as the executive director of the Pasadena Playhouse.
White is a second-generation writer and director, but he could not fairly be described as a nepo baby. Mel White was for a time a leading storyteller in the evangelical movement. Starting in the early nineteen-seventies, he wrote a series of inspirational tracts, and then ghostwrote books for some of the movement’s most prominent figures, including Pat Robertson (“America’s Dates with Destiny”) and Jerry Falwell (“Strength for the Journey”). He also helped direct documentaries for Francis Schaeffer, the influential theologian. Mike attended an exclusive day school in Pasadena, and on Sundays he went to a Congregationalist church to hear his father preach against materialism, sometimes arguing that Christians shouldn’t even own homes. In the summer, he was sent to a Christian camp that held rapture drills. “I felt like an outsider, but I didn’t dress the part of a countercultural person,” he said. “It took a while to figure out what, exactly, I was counter to.”
During those years, Mel was struggling to quench his lifelong attraction to men. When Mike was around eleven, he stumbled on one of his father’s journals and began to discover that his parents’ marriage was more complicated than he had suspected. “It was definitely a house of secrets,” he remembers. In 1993, Mel publicly announced that he was gay, and the next year he published “Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America,” an affecting memoir that described his efforts to change, including electroconvulsive therapy; his decision to stop trying to change; and his disappointment that his former friends and allies, especially Robertson and Falwell, weren’t willing to reconsider their beliefs about same-sex romance, or even talk with him about his life. On “60 Minutes,” Mel tried to explain why he had waited to publicly criticize people he so disagreed with. “I was blinded by my love for Jesus, and my love for the Scripture, and my hopes for the Church,” he said. “And I was—yeah, I had two kids in college.”
White’s older sister, Erinn, attended Azusa Pacific, and is now a teacher. White went to Wesleyan, where he became known as a writer of sharp dialogue. One of his T.A.s, Zak Penn, remembers a scene that he wrote depicting two women getting drunk in a bar. “I was astonished that he had written something that well observed,” Penn says: the women sounded like real people, talking about real lives.
Not long afterward, Penn moved to Hollywood, and landed a hundred-and-sixty-thousand-dollar writing deal. (He had co-written the script that became “Last Action Hero,” starring Patrick Schwarzenegger’s father.) He offered half the fee to White after he graduated. White was a hard worker, though not by nature a team player. Penn recalls, “I said, ‘I’ll do the first fifteen pages, and you do the next fifteen.’ That was a Friday, and on Monday he came in with forty pages written—all great.”
When a fellow Wesleyan graduate, Miguel Arteta, gave White and Penn small roles in an indie film he was making, “Star Maps,” White couldn’t resist rewriting their few lines of dialogue. The two played smug screenwriters, and White thought that his character should respond to a director’s suggestion about making a sex scene more political by saying, “When they’re fucking on her desk, she can knock over a recycling bin.” Arteta wasn’t offended—he was impressed. “I was, like, ‘Dear God, yes, please, let’s shoot this,’ ” he says.
It was the late nineties, and White was shopping some screenplays while taking TV-writing jobs. Arteta found himself preoccupied with one of White’s scripts, “Chuck & Buck,” about a guy who can’t let go of his boyhood best friend. Arteta asked White to let him direct, and White played Buck. In an era of twee indie films, Buck was defiantly uncharming—a “lost, gay predator retard,” as White once called him. Over the years, White has described himself as bisexual or gay, but he wanted to resist the neat logic of the coming-out story. “My dad suffered a lot from wanting to appear good,” he told me. “It was so important for him to say, ‘Gays are just like you, we’re good little boys.’ And ‘Chuck & Buck’ is me being, like, ‘I don’t want to be making that argument for my career, or my life. I’m not a good little boy.’ ” White took his father to a screening, and remembers Mel grabbing his leg in feigned shock—or, perhaps, real shock—during some of the film’s most uncomfortable moments, like Buck’s desperate and manipulative pleas for sex. “I thought, He’s way ahead of me, in terms of dealing with issues you don’t deal with publicly,” Mel White told me. “The first movie he made, and the star only wanted a blow job.”
One of the film’s fans was Jennifer Aniston, who agreed to play the lead in White and Arteta’s next collaboration, “The Good Girl,” which starts out like a romantic comedy and then goes disastrously, absurdly wrong. Something similar happened to White’s career a few years later, after he got an offer to create a sitcom for Fox. “Cracking Up” was about a young psychology student who moves into the guesthouse of a wealthy Beverly Hills family. As the tagline put it, “Meet the all-American family—and the therapist crazy enough to live with them!”
Fox had ambitious goals for the show—which was broadcast immediately after “American Idol”—and apparently that was part of the problem. Molly Shannon played the mother, who suffered from a frantic addiction to pills and alcohol. She says that the set was great fun until the network started thinking that viewers might prefer a show that was less unhinged. Shannon remembers a disagreement with executives over a scene in which her character tried to bust open a safe containing the family’s alcohol supply. “It was such brilliant writing, and just a joy—but then they started giving these notes that were not good,” she says. “And, really, Mike was getting stressed out.”
As a writer, White could appreciate the irony: under the pressure of trying to manage a show called “Cracking Up,” he was cracking up. He wrote a letter to Fox, insulting the executives and all but daring them to cancel. Eventually, he found himself so paralyzed by stress that he thought he might be having a nervous breakdown, and briefly visited Las Encinas, a Pasadena psychiatric hospital. In the end, he turned to Buddhist self-help books, even as he cringed at the idea of a burned-out Hollywood writer doing self-actualization exercises. “You see it as the absurdity that it is,” he said. “But then, the next minute, you’re kind of still drinking the Kool-Aid.”
One of White’s favorite tactics is to give a character a speech that’s both serious and funny—not wholly convincing but not wholly inane. For a time, in the early nineties, he lived next door to Jack Black, and he wrote “School of Rock” with him in mind. (More than once, White has surprised a prospective collaborator with a script that no one knew he was working on.) Black, who was then establishing himself as a good-natured but anarchic film star, was amazed at how well the screenplay captured his vibe. “That’s my tombstone role, for sure,” he told me.
Early in the movie, Black’s character, Dewey, a hapless rocker who fakes his way into a gig as a substitute teacher, tells a roomful of students that the world is rigged against them:
Black’s bug-eyed charisma makes this pathetic sermon seem halfway convincing, and gives viewers a moment to calibrate their opinion of Dewey. (Would you entrust your child to this man?) “School of Rock” is basically a wholesome family film, but it delivers a complicated message: even a flawed doctrine can be compelling, and transformative. This, perhaps, is a lesson that White learned as a boy, sitting next to the pulpit when his father was preaching. And perhaps he learned it again at Wesleyan, where he wrote a thesis on Judith Butler and earnestly studied the scriptures of postmodern theory. “Wesleyan was, like, the P.C. school, before institutions all became sort of like that, and I embraced the theology of that for a long time,” he says. (The atmosphere there was intense enough to inspire the 1994 satire “PCU,” co-written by Zak Penn.)
Attentive followers of White’s career may find themselves anticipating the loopy gospels that his characters preach—and then, inevitably, fail to entirely practice. In “Enlightened,” the main character, Amy, is emerging from a breakdown and trying to put her newfound wisdom to use. The show opens with our hero sobbing in a bathroom stall. “You look insane,” a co-worker tells her, and the subsequent episodes complicate this judgment without quite refuting it. By the end of the second season, Amy is a crusader against corporate corruption—but also, still, an annoying and bottomlessly needy presence, as so many of us are, at least some of the time.
After her breakdown, Amy goes to a retreat in Hawaii, and a voice-over narrates the words we see her writing in her journal:
Like much of what Amy says in the course of two seasons, this is ludicrous without necessarily being wrong. Part of what White loved about the character was that she wasn’t cool—she had little in common with Tony Soprano, Walter White, Don Draper, or other manly television rogues. White says that HBO executives worried about the “emo voice-overs” that bookended many of the episodes, and the “tonal ambivalence” that has long been one of his favorite qualities. At one point, Amy’s ex-husband goes on the Hawaiian retreat that she loved. He hates it. “It’s like I’m in a Hawaiian prison,” he says. The episode was broadcast in 2013, the year that White bought a house in Hawaii—having decided, apparently, that Amy’s notion of finding renewal in the middle of the Pacific Ocean wasn’t so ridiculous after all.
Even by Hawaiian standards, Kauai is a low-key place: quieter than Oahu and less opulent than Maui. White lives across the street from the ocean, and he has set up editing bays in several units of a time-share development nearby, an arrangement that suits both his temperament and the show’s budget. (The state government offers a twenty-seven-per-cent tax credit for certain film-production work undertaken on Kauai.) I visited White there in early December. A few friends were in town, and his flatulent bulldog, Peanut, was following him loyally wherever he went. He seemed to have recovered from the stress of the shoot, although now he was facing the stress of having to edit the footage into a show that met his standards. “I’m so fried, bro,” he said, strolling along the wide beach, with mountains framing a neon sunset. “It’s really nice to be somewhere like this, around all this natural beauty, and just chill.”
In fact, White’s time in Hawaii did not seem particularly chill. He said that his relationship with his long-term boyfriend had fallen apart because “The White Lotus” had taken over his schedule; his life was one long working vacation. And yet he was already thinking about scouting locations for the fourth season. “I’m not in a relationship, I don’t have kids,” he said. “I’d love to have a break, but two weeks in I’d be, like”—he imagined himself sitting home, restless—“what are we doing?”
Not all of White’s projects have been manifestly personal. (He once spent a couple of weeks doctoring the script for “The Emoji Movie.”) But, after the failure of “Cracking Up,” he fulfilled a promise to write something for Molly Shannon. The script became “Year of the Dog,” which was released in 2007, as White’s directorial début. Shannon played Peggy, a lonely office worker who develops a passion for animal rights after the death of her dog, Pencil. In a different kind of film, Peggy might learn some lessons, find a boyfriend, and return to her office job, wiser and happier. Instead, a trapdoor seems to open in White’s script, and Peggy falls through it. She commits financial fraud and attempts murder; offered an unlikely chance at redemption, she abandons her old life to devote herself to animal welfare. She explains her conversion, naturally, with a voice-over speech that is among the most cockeyed in the Mike White œuvre: “How do I explain the things I’ve said and done? How do I explain the person I’ve become? I know I’ve disappointed everyone, and I’m sorry for that. I wish I was a more articulate person. I believe life is magical.”
By the time White made the film, he was a vegan—he says that his opposition to animal cruelty is about as close as he comes to zealotry. Shannon and White are a reliably funny and off-kilter team (she also appears in “Enlightened” and “The White Lotus”), and not long ago she came to visit him in Hawaii. One day, while White was distracted with a phone call, Shannon tried to pet Peanut, who nipped her in the face. “I have no hard feelings toward Peanut,” Shannon told me. If anything, she seemed pleased to know that White had such a fierce protector.
White says that, in some ways, the “White Lotus” character he most resembles is Quinn, the socially maladroit son from Season 1, who doesn’t seem to care about anyone or anything until he joins a sea-canoeing crew of local men. Exalted, he decides not to go home.
White now owns two houses on Kauai. Compared with the tourists, he is a local, but compared with the natives he is a wealthy interloper, not entirely different from the “White Lotus” characters he satirized. “Unless I feel somehow personally indicted, it doesn’t feel like I’m doing anything that bold,” he told me. “I have to take these people seriously enough that it isn’t just a satire.” One of Kauai’s most famous part-time residents, Mark Zuckerberg, reportedly owns more than a thousand acres of beachfront property, including an underground bunker. But the difference between his compound and White’s modest pair of houses is merely one of scale. “I can make fun of Mark Zuckerberg—but I am also that person,” White says.
Last fall, HBO announced a global partnership with Four Seasons, the resort chain where the majority of all three seasons of “The White Lotus” were filmed. (The companies promise “on-site activations at Four Seasons properties globally designed to engage audiences across multiple touchpoints.”) HBO sells “White Lotus” bathrobes, and Coffee-mate is celebrating the show’s return with a “White Lotus”-branded nondairy creamer flavored like Thai iced coffee. One day, when I was having lunch with White, he got a text from his father, who still lives in California, proudly sharing the news that the show had made the front page of the Los Angeles Times. The headline read “THAILAND GEARS UP FOR ROLE PAYOFF.” The article reported that the country was expecting an influx of visitors thanks to the show.
White recognizes that glamorous locales are essential to the reliable television formula that he describes as “attractive people in beautiful places doing sexy, dirty shit.” He was lured to Thailand not just by its narrative possibilities but also by tax incentives that the other main contender, Japan, was unable to match. Much of the season was filmed at a Four Seasons on Koh Samui, an island in the Gulf of Thailand, where a suite can cost as much as fifteen thousand dollars a night; some scenes were filmed at a secluded hillside hotel in Phuket. Footage of the two would be combined to create the fictional White Lotus Thailand.
Most of the actors, like their characters, were visitors, but the cast also included a handful of renowned locals, none more renowned than Lalisa Manoban, the country’s leading pop star, who is better known as Lisa, from the world-conquering K-pop group BLACKPINK. At first, White was wary of Manoban, even though she had a strong audition, not to mention a hundred and five million followers on Instagram. He didn’t want to seem desperate for attention, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to deal with the extra security that would be required. But he came to see that it might seem disrespectful, both to Manoban and to her country, not to cast her. When the news broke that she would have a part, some of the show’s Thai staffers broke down in tears—and, White says, Thai officials became even more eager to help.
White acknowledged that his desire to do right by Thailand sometimes conflicted with his lifelong desire to tell stories that are “mischievous,” as he puts it. “There’s moments where I’m, like, ‘Do I want to show this side of Thailand?’ ” he said. He was referring, perhaps, to the raffish culture down the hill in the Patong entertainment district, which is known for providing a more unpretentious vacation experience than the one typically depicted in the series: rowdy bars, late-night massage spas, Muay Thai fights. “I feel this need to show the beauty, make people want to come here,” White said.
Last summer, when HBO released the first images from the new season, some viewers objected to the sepia tones: they thought it looked as if White had filmed Thailand with a so-called Mexico filter, an approach made infamous by the Steven Soderbergh movie “Traffic,” which contrasted yellow-tinted scenes set in Mexico with blue-tinted scenes set in the United States. (Critics felt that the yellow tint was a lazy way to evoke a world of heat, dirt, and disorder.) By December, when the first teaser was released, set to a song by the beloved Thai rock band Carabao, the images were noticeably less yellow.
Many viewers have heard of the Bechdel test, named for the cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who in 1985 depicted a character saying that she would watch a movie only if it had at least two women in it who had a conversation about “something besides a man.” Watching the first season of “The White Lotus,” I found myself thinking about a different standard. I call it the pervert test. Whenever I see a nonwhite character onscreen, I find myself wondering, Could this character possibly be a pervert? Or at any rate a creep, a brute, a charlatan, a narcissist, a villain? Or will this character turn out to be drearily decent, possessed of no serious flaws except those which can be justified by the character’s backstory or by the flaws of society?
The thought arose because “The White Lotus” is so full of transgression and bad behavior, especially when it comes to sex. In the first season, Steve Zahn plays Mark, who is thrown by the revelation that his late father was gay. His daughter, Olivia, played by Sydney Sweeney, torments him by cheerfully considering the precise arrangements. “Even if he wasn’t a top, it doesn’t mean he was femme,” she says. “He could have still been butch, Dad.” (Zahn’s character does not find this consoling.) Armond, the hotel manager, played by the Australian actor Murray Bartlett, bears a resemblance to Basil Fawlty, the manic proprietor in “Fawlty Towers,” the old British sitcom. He is also a gay man who commits a spectacular act of sexual harassment, and an even more spectacular act of nonsexual harassment: in a frenzy of anger and desperation, he defecates in a guest’s suitcase.
Understandably, perhaps, White seems a bit more cautious when it comes to race. Natasha Rothwell, who plays the spa manager Belinda, is Black, and her character sometimes sounds like a spokesperson. “The clientele here is mostly rich white people—and to be honest I struggle with that,” she says in an early episode, as if expecting viewers to nod along. By the end of the season, though, these mostly rich white people have been complicated and, in some cases, vindicated. Olivia and her stringently progressive friend Paula, played by the biracial actor Brittany O’Grady, function as a kind of Greek chorus, offering deadpan observations of the world around them. But Paula turns out to be, if not precisely a pervert, then probably some kind of villain. “I was, like, ‘This is going to get me in trouble,’ ” White said. “But I felt like it was worth it.” As it happened, there was not much trouble. Reviews were almost uniformly positive, and though one critic described Olivia’s cracks about her grandfather’s sexuality as “disturbingly unfunny,” it’s not clear that White considers this a criticism.
The pervert test did not much apply to the second season, in which virtually everyone was white. That season was even more of a sensation than the first one, thanks in part to its debauched atmosphere. Two of the most memorable characters were high-spirited Sicilian sex workers. And White seemed to take particular pleasure in inverting his father’s cosmology, as Tanya descended into a hellish subculture of what White describes as “evil gays.” The whooping theme song became an unlikely night-club hit, summoning a world of bad behavior.
The new season includes a hint of incest, or perhaps more than a hint, as well as a gay plotline that is, White promises, “truly Satanic.” He likes the idea of finding ways to depict gay life as transgressive, or even perverted—not, of course, to condemn it but to connect it to the rest of humanity, and the rest of human sexuality. “It’s not all harmless,” he says. “But it’s not inherently harmful. It’s inherently very natural. We’re animals.”
White is intensely aware of how much the ethos of Hollywood has changed since the nineties, at least superficially. Back then, he says, the networks would quiz people like him about their female characters: “Is she hot? Is she fuckable?” Nowadays, he says, the same kinds of executives might ask, “Do we have a person of color?” His instinct has always been to resist these sorts of demands. In 2023, when the Writers Guild of America went on strike, one of its goals was to compel studios to increase the size of writers’ rooms, which some people hoped would give more diverse writers a chance to learn the trade. White is unusual in that he works entirely alone, although he does solicit feedback on the finished scripts. “I don’t want a writers’ room,” he told me. “I don’t have time to mentor anybody, and I don’t really want to be scrutinized that way.” (In the end, the new deal retained an exception for writers who truly work alone.) White’s approach means that he is often creating dialogue for characters who do not resemble him, in contravention of the idea that demographic authenticity is a necessary ingredient in a great script. But the opportunity to transgress boundaries of identity is one of his favorite parts of writing; many of his most celebrated characters, after all, are women. “It’s a pleasure to try to get inside someone’s head,” he says.
For this season, White brought back Belinda. On set in Thailand, I mentioned to Rothwell that many fans perceived Belinda as an oasis of decency, and I asked whether she ever wished that her character could be as indecent as some of the others. She told me that she had thought carefully about giving Belinda agency, and suggested that it might be possible to read her not as a spa manager with a heart of gold but as a strategic operator whose big idea—that Tanya will invest in her new business—suggests a certain degree of “narcissism” and “hubris.” When I relayed this interpretation to White, he sounded skeptical, but he did allow that Belinda might have a chance to make some mistakes of her own this season.
When it comes to the depiction of Thai people, White seems to expect a fair amount of scrutiny. “In Italy, all the Italian characters were running around fucking each other,” he told me. “If I had made the Thai characters all sex workers, it would have been a problem.” Even one Thai sex worker might have been considered one too many, unless the portrayal was scrupulously high-minded. So he made sure that Manoban’s character, a charming hotel employee named Mook, was someone that her fans could be proud of. “She’s not a pervert—she fails the pervert test,” White said, almost apologetically. “But she’s a hustler. She’s pushy.”
Despite his early exposure to Sam Shepard, White doesn’t think of himself as particularly highbrow. “I’m not really a Criterion guy,” he says. One of his abiding passions is reality television, particularly shows in which competitors are made to suffer under pressure. In 2009, he appeared, with his father, on “The Amazing Race,” which sends pairs of contestants on around-the-world scavenger hunts. The Whites were portrayed as something of an oddity: a gay father-and-son duo, unusually kind to each other and to fellow-contestants. Mel, who was seventy, was the oldest person on the show, but far from the weakest. “I think the other teams might think my dad is Cloris Leachman, but he’s really MacGyver,” Mike said, in the opening episode. After a series of mishaps, they were ejected in Phuket, and spent weeks in a house with other discarded contestants; the new season of “The White Lotus” is, in a way, White’s chance for redemption.
White is also a fan of “Survivor,” the gruelling elimination show. It is probably not a coincidence that “Survivor” and “The White Lotus” share a structural resemblance: a bunch of big—and often annoying—personalities convene in an exotic location, and audiences try to guess who is going to be eliminated. Over the years, White became friendly with the host of “Survivor,” Jeff Probst, and convinced him that he would make a great contestant. In 2018, White appeared on the show’s thirty-seventh season, in Fiji, which matched overachieving “Goliaths” against underdog “Davids.” White was sorted into the Goliath tribe, and came close to winning the show’s million-dollar prize by slipping into character as a more or less regular guy, unthreatening enough to evade attention. Probst told me, “There were a couple of people who said, ‘Is he a David or a Goliath?’ I said, ‘Are you kidding? Good luck winning an argument with Mike White.’ ”
One reason viewers are drawn to reality television is that the rules governing identity and behavior aren’t so strict: given sufficient time and duress, just about everyone will pass the pervert test. On “Survivor,” White had a frosty relationship with Natalie Cole, a self-possessed Black woman from Los Angeles who was sorted into the Goliath tribe, by virtue of her career as a newspaper and magazine publisher. By the third episode, White was complaining that Cole was “an unpleasant drain around camp,” and some of his fellow-Goliaths seemed to agree. If this had been a scripted series, Cole would have been given a chance to show that she wasn’t so unpleasant, and White would have had a moment to confront his own assumptions, and possibly his own racism. But on “Survivor” this conflict went unresolved, especially since Cole was voted out in the fifth episode.
Not long ago, though, she got an unexpected message from White, who wanted to know if she’d like to fly to Thailand for a small role in “The White Lotus.” He said that he respected her as a person and a competitor, and he liked the idea of affirming the connection between the two franchises. (“Survivor” contestants appeared in the first two seasons.) Cole agreed. “We were kind of in conflict a lot,” she recalled, in Phuket. Still, she suggested that White’s scrupulous attention to behavior and body language helped explain both his success on “Survivor”and his success in Hollywood. “It is personal, but, at the end of the day, it’s a game,” she said.
Twelve years ago, when “Enlightened” was on the verge of being cancelled, White sat for an interview with Marc Maron, the comedian and podcaster. White sounded as if “Enlightened” was his one big shot, and he was bracing for it to be taken away. “I had the Cinderella experience of the show,” he said, noting that its ratings were unspectacular, with fewer than a million viewers a week. “At some point, I’m going to come back to reality.”
Nowadays, ratings are more mysterious, because streaming networks don’t share data in a uniform or transparent way. (HBO said that the Season 2 finale of “The White Lotus” attracted more than four million viewers, although most of that number reflects people who watched some or all of the episode online.) Expectations of longevity have changed, too: many viewers no longer assume that a show will last more than a few seasons.
In this climate, the popularity of “The White Lotus” seems like something of a throwback to the age of prestige television. White has noticed that his friends are finding it harder to sell their TV and film ideas—in fact, “The White Lotus” was partly inspired by “The Tears of St. Patsy,” a proposed series starring Jennifer Coolidge as a frustrated actor navigating a dangerous world. When White shopped it to networks, no one was interested. (“Everybody passed,” he told the crowd at the Golden Globes, when he accepted an award for “The White Lotus” in 2023. Peering around the room, he added, “I know you all passed.”) White still seems amazed that his little pandemic idea has turned into the biggest hit of his life. “Somehow, I got on the last helicopter out of the dystopia that is Hollywood,” he says.
He was sitting in one of the makeshift editing suites in Kauai: staffers had pushed aside a bed to install four monitors and two big speakers on tripods. A ceiling fan whirred, Peanut snored, and White calculated how much time he had to make small changes. “HBO’s not expecting it till Friday of next week, so there’s no rush,” he told one of the editors. This was Episode 6, of eight, and it was a little long. “Sixty-three twenty-nine—ugh,” White said. “Are you trying to get me in trouble?” Anything longer than an hour was likely to inspire suggestions from HBO, and White was not feeling particularly suggestible. He finds the editing process satisfying in a way that directing cannot be, because it yields something tangible: a finished episode, to justify the money he’s getting from the network. On set, he is obliged to be enthusiastic, so that the actors don’t get discouraged, but in the editing bay he is unsparing. “It’s a lot of eye acting going on,” White said, disapprovingly, when he thought some facial gestures were unnecessarily big.
At least in its first two episodes, the new season is less fizzy than its predecessors, and more hardboiled: a show that once revolved around acerbic conversation now seems to be building toward a dénouement that involves at least one monk and at least one handgun. White’s most important task is to locate that familiar mix of flavors—a kind of gin-and-tonic astringency—in every scene. At one point, he asked to reëdit a seemingly minor exchange that sounded too earnest. “The sincerity of it is making me laugh,” he said.
In some ways, the imperative of reinventing “The White Lotus” is an advantage: the cast changes, White says, actually help with morale: “You’re more in the dating stage. As opposed to ‘I expected more out of my life and my marriage than this!’ ”
Even now, White thinks of “The White Lotus” as a bit of a fluke, and he knows there is no guarantee that people who loved the silly second season will also love the decidedly less silly third one. “It isn’t exactly a crowd-pleaser,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, but we’ll see.” As far as he can tell, “The White Lotus” makes more sense in 2025 than it did in 2021, when the prevailing mood was a bit gentler and more earnest. “I think the sensibilities of the culture have changed,” he says. “I think people want a little blood in the mouth.” He is aware, though, that a brainy storyteller with a rather perverse sensibility is unlikely to remain at the center of mainstream culture indefinitely. “I’m fifty-four years old,” he told me. “I feel like I’ve been out in the ocean, waiting for a wave. It’s getting to sunset—maybe I’ll just swim in. And then I catch a wave? I’m definitely going to ride this wave.” ♦
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