The White Lotus creator Mike White looks like a dude who’s just returned from a long, hard-partying vacation. He’s sitting on the hidden patio of an L.A. café wearing a white T-shirt with an “Aloha Hawaii” logo and a bright blue “Kawaii” trucker cap, the kind of generic garments you’d grab at a souvenir shop if the airline lost your luggage or you were on the run from the law. Rumpling his straw-white hair, White apologizes for being so hungover. The writer-director had spent the previous night nervously drinking through the premiere of his new HBO limited series—undoubtedly one of the most delightfully disconcerting projects to emerge from the global pandemic meltdown, made in quarantine conditions at a Maui resort in the fall of 2020.

White is an auteur of uneasiness. From Chuck & Buck to Enlightened, his work has entwined sweetness and satire in off-kilter ways. The White Lotus ratchets up both. An ensemble series, it is set at an exclusive resort crammed with guests absorbed by their own micro-dramas, whether it’s Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), an unhinged heiress who’s come to the island to scatter her mother’s ashes; Shane (Jake Lacy), a wealthy newlywed who spends more time obsessing about being given an inferior room than he does romancing his new bride, Rachel (Alexandra Daddario); or Mark (Steve Zahn), who worries that his swollen balls indicate testicular cancer while his powerhouse wife (Connie Britton) and spoiled children blithely go about their business.

Critics sometimes dub the oddball characters in White’s shows and movies unlikeable. He says that word startles him every time. “[The characters] all have their failings. But I identify with them all in different ways because…it’s coming from me!” he cackles loudly. “Am I that bad?”

But genuine tragedy looms over the characters in The White Lotus: The show’s opening flash-forward reveals that someone will be leaving the island in a box.

“I wanted it to feel like a tropical anxiety attack,” White says of the tone he aimed for. “A little bit of blood in the mouth.” That ominous vibe is accentuated by Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s score—foreboding waves of twitchy rhythms and tribal chants that seem to engulf the resort’s guests at regular intervals. De Veer, who also wrote the music for Black Mirror’s “Black Museum” episode, captures the highly strung mood perfectly. 

White wanted a score that would conjure the image of “pretty people sitting next to swimming pools—but you feel like there’s going to be a human sacrifice at some point,” he says with a lopsided grin. “That’s how I sometimes feel on vacation myself. I’m in this beautiful location away from all my problems. So why am I having this existential dread all day long?”

Production on The White Lotus was unusually intense; the series was shot last fall, during lockdown. Cast and crew were living together at the Four Seasons Resort in Maui and, White says, “We could not leave the hotel. So it spilled over to the vibe of the show, which is sort of that feeling of ‘You’re on vacation, but why do you feel trapped?’”

White says HBO executives had approached him in August 2020, asking if he could create a new drama with very tight parameters: something shot superfast, because so many sets had been shut down during the pandemic, and made in a single location to facilitate a COVID-friendly bubble. “It was kind of like Name That Tune,” he says, hearkening back to the old game show in which contestants had to name a song after hearing just a few notes. White, who prefers to create series without a writers room and has been increasingly eager to direct, was in: “I’ll do whatever,” he told the network. “I want to work. I just can’t sit and watch the world burn!” The White Lotus began shooting in October and wrapped by the end of 2020.

White has one of the most provocative and underrated oeuvres in Hollywood. But if you tried to make a graph of his movie and television career, it would look like a tangled shoelace. After working in the writers rooms for TV shows like Dawson’s Creek and Freaks and Geeks, he shuffled into the limelight with the well-reviewed 2000 indie film Chuck & Buck. It was a deeply idiosyncratic black comedy, directed by Miguel Arteta and written by White, who also starred in it as a young man romantically fixated on his childhood friend.

Over the next 20 years, White careened between pop cultural busts (short-lived TV series you probably never heard of, like Pasadena and Cracking Up) and booms (School of Rock and Nacho Libre). The latter two emerged from his friendship with Jack Black, who happened to be his next-door neighbor. “He kept sending me scripts that he was thinking of doing and they were always, like, a drunk frat guy falls through a stained-glass window or something,” White recalls. “I felt there was something funner we could do, and I had this idea to do him with kids and a band.” White also wrote a role for himself as Ned Schneebly, the gawky roommate of Black’s character.

School of Rock was a hit that spawned a Broadway musical and a Nickelodeon TV series. But with director Richard Linklater at the helm, White initially felt the movie had an indie spirit. Like their characters, White and Black shared an apartment while filming in New York, which he says made every day seem like a Jack Black romp: “He’d be dragging home Christmas trees and falling off ladders—there was just constant mayhem in the house.”

White soon figured out that School of Rock was “one of those lucky, lightning-in-a-bottle type of things,” he says. Other scripts he wrote tended to be quietly unclassifiable. There was the 2002 movie The Good Girl, starring Jennifer Aniston—straight out of Friends—as a depressed cashier longing for an escape from her moribund marriage and dead-end life. In 2007, White wrote and directed the even darker comedy Year of the Dog, with Molly Shannon (who also does a star turn in The White Lotus) as a woman aggressively searching for meaning in animal rights activism.

How to be a good person: That’s a theme running through much of White’s recent work, including the movie Beatriz at Dinner, about an immigrant and healer (Salma Hayek) who confronts her wealthy clients and their business associates at a dinner party from hell. The film felt cathartic, especially since it arrived in the early days of the Trump administration. But White sometimes wishes they’d gone with the original ending he wrote for the film, in which Beatriz kills one of the dinner guests. “I was afraid—are people gonna think that I’m advocating political assassinations?”

White’s HBO series Enlightened was a masterpiece of cringe-tinged dramedy, featuring Laura Dern as Amy Jellicoe, a solipsistic corporate executive transformed into a whistleblower and social justice warrior after a nervous breakdown and a stint in rehab causes her to rethink her life. White told me back in 2011, when Enlightened premiered, that Amy’s earnestness felt radical to him. “It’s nice to put a spotlight on somebody who embodies some of the values people shy away from, to try to create a character who’s not cool in any way,” he said. “In this political climate, I wanted to give some of those values their day in the sun again.”

Enlightened was canceled after just two seasons—a critics’ darling that couldn’t draw a broad audience. “Amy Jellicoe was particularly ‘unlikable’ in ways that really got under men’s skin,” White points out now. He has since proposed a few shows to HBO (one about a drag queen turned nanny, another a zany road comedy starring Jennifer Coolidge), but nothing got the green light until The White Lotus.

“Enlightened was about somebody who didn’t have any power and money and wanted to make an impact on the world,” White says between bites of his tofu scramble. In The White Lotus, he intended to get inside the mindset of the ruling class, to explore “why things are hard to change. And it isn’t just simply ‘rich people are selfish and oblivious’—although that is an element in the show. But it’s also that people are trying to win the game of life. We are all taught to go out and win and achieve, so they don’t see themselves as the villains of the story. They see themselves as the underdog.”

The same goes for White himself. A voracious reality-TV fan, he competed on Survivor’s David vs. Goliath season—but instead of being categorized as a nerdy David, the show’s producers put him (quite rightly, as a Hollywood player) on the Goliaths team. That freaked him out a little. White, the son of a minister, grew up in what he calls “a very anti-materialistic family.” Now he’s not sure he’s doing enough good with his money.

“Am I the villain in my story?” he shouts in mock horror, loudly enough that a well-heeled lady lunching at the next (socially distanced) table turns her head in puzzlement.

The White Lotus gleams with edgy satire, taking the measure of its characters right down to the books they’re reading. White had newlyweds Shane and Rachel reading “very normie books” (Malcolm Gladwell for him, Elena Ferrante for her, a few years behind the trend). He didn’t want the ensemble’s two snarky college students (Sydney Sweeney and Brittany O’Grady) to be glued to their phones, so he asked the prop master to procure hardcover copies of titles he read in college: Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Franz Fanon, and other books that might start them superficially pondering questions of privilege and colonialism.

Beneath the satire, White wanted to make sure that each character has the capacity to be both an underdog and an overlord, from Tanya the heiress to resort manager Armond (played to the hilt by Murray Bartlett). “People can be kind and cruel, and every person has that capability,” White says. “I think there’s a tendency to want to project virtue on the underdog and some kind of negative to the person who has money, but the truth is, it’s situational.” He takes his blue trucker cap off his head, smoothes down his tufts of hair, and then slaps the cap back on. “Sometimes when people get everything they want,” he continues. “It perverts their character. It’s not good for spiritual personal growth.”

When I ask White what he wants to do next, he bites his lip. Does he dream of taking a swing at a Marvel movie? “I’m almost against them at this point,” he groans. “Like, are we all 12 years old? What is going on?”

No, what White really wants is to create another round of The White Lotus—set in different glamorous locations like France and Japan. But he’s also wary of acting like the privileged characters he writes.

He recently flew back to Maui to screen the series on the island. When he checked into the Four Seasons, where he’d spent four months shooting The White Lotus, the front desk staffer told him his room wouldn’t be ready for hours. Exasperated, White was all set to throw his weight around: “I am the one that kept you guys afloat for months!” Then he realized that he sounded exactly like one of his show’s obnoxious, over-privileged characters. “Oh, my God, I cannot be this guy,” he told himself, before sheepishly walking away. “You definitely don’t want to be that guy.”

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