Mike White, the quirky hitmaker behind ‘The White Lotus’
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The White Lotus, this summer’s breakout TV hit in the US, was born out of desperation. With the pandemic shutting down much of HBO’s production schedule last year, the network approached writer-director Mike White and asked if he had any ideas that could be quickly turned into a show. Besides speed, HBO needed simplicity: the programme had to be set in just one Covid bubble-able location.
White, known in Hollywood as someone who can knock out a good script in a hurry, had an idea about newly weds who discover that they are mismatched during their honeymoon. Francesca Orsi, HBO’s executive vice-president, bit on the basic concept, and White got to work on the script in August. Filming began on location at the Four Seasons Maui in Hawaii just two months later. The scripts “were basically first drafts,” White told the LA Times.
The White Lotus has been a big hit for HBO, with the season finale in the US drawing 1.9m viewers, up 350 per cent from its series debut on July 11 (It launched in the UK on August 16). Critics have mostly given it warm notices, with The New Yorker’s Naomi Fry calling it “a near-note-perfect tragicomedy”.
Set inside the fictional, ultra-luxury White Lotus hotel, it tackles one-percenter privilege, racism and the legacy of imperialism, among other themes. The drama centres on the interactions between the hotel staff and the wealthy guests who have come to enjoy five-star treatment in Maui. As in White’s previous work, it explores characters who are either self-obsessed, plagued by self-doubt or in the midst of some sort of breakdown. Clearly, all is not well in paradise.
First we meet Shane, a wealthy, clean-cut New Yorker who manages to be both a mama’s boy and a Type-A hothead. He is on his honeymoon with Rachel, an attractive freelance journalist who seems to be seeing the real Shane for the first time — and not liking what she sees. Then there is the Mossbacher family, led by Nicole, a tech executive travelling with her lost-in-the-universe husband, porn addict son, mean-girl daughter Olivia and her not-wealthy college friend, Paula. Rounding out the guests is Tanya, an heiress on the edge who becomes infatuated with the spa manager, Belinda.
The White Lotus has drawn attention for the way it raises contemporary social themes, but it is also a well-crafted piece of television. Each episode leaves the audience craving more, much like another successful show set on an island: Survivor. This is probably not a coincidence. White is unashamed about his love of reality TV and has even appeared as a contestant on Survivor as well as on The Amazing Race, in which he competed alongside his father, Mel.
These reality-show detours somehow make sense in the quirky, quarter-century long career that White, 51, has built in Hollywood. He has been a writer, actor and producer — in the case of The White Lotus, he wrote, produced and directed it*. Seemingly happiest with squirm-inducing material, White has also seen success with straightforward comedy.
He first gained notice with a quartet of films he wrote in the early 2000s, most notably School of Rock (2003), a high-grossing hit starring Jack Black that went on to become a musical and TV show. He wrote and acted in the critically-acclaimed The Good Girl in 2002, starring Jennifer Aniston, and produced the screenplay for Orange County (2002), again featuring Black.
But perhaps more typical of White was the offbeat, award-winning Chuck & Buck, released in 2000, which he wrote and starred in. He plays Buck, a needy, naive character who stalks his now-successful childhood best friend in the hope of re-establishing some kind of connection. That debut film established the uncomfortable themes that would recur to such effect in his later work.
White grew up in Pasadena, California, where his father was a minister and ghostwriter for evangelical Christian leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Jim and Tammy Bakker. When White was 11, Mel came out to his family but remained in the closet to protect his job in the ministry until his children finished university.
White was drawn to writing and drama at an early age, inspired by a second-grade teacher whose son was playwright and actor Sam Shepard. He attended Wesleyan University in Connecticut before returning to LA, where he began writing for teen drama Dawson’s Creek.
After an early burst of success, however, White hit a wall. In 2004, he had a nervous breakdown while working on a television show that was not going well. He was checked into a psychiatric hospital and the show was cancelled. “I felt weak and lost, like a screw-up, and at the same time, coming out of it, I felt like I’d been given a huge gift,” he told the New York Times in 2011.
After recovering from his breakdown, he continued to act and write steadily, often working with Black with whom he formed a production company. His relationship with HBO began with an edgy show called Enlightened, released in 2011 and starring Laura Dern, who co-created it with White.
Though Enlightened ended after just two seasons, White’s legion of fans at HBO is only growing. The network announced on August 10 that there would be a second instalment of The White Lotus, setting off furious speculation about where it will be set and whether any of this season’s characters will return. Somewhere, the speed-writing White is conjuring up the answers.
*This story has been amended since initial publication to correct the description of White’s role in the show. He did not act in The White Lotus.
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