“The White Lotus” series creator Mike White is speaking out on former colleague Cristóbal Tapia de Veer, who announced his exit from the show the week the highly-anticipated Season 3 finale was set to air. The Emmy-winning composer told the New York Times that a clash about the Season 3 theme song with White was in part why he opted to leave the buzzy series. At the time, Tapia de Veer admitted that he did not tell White about quitting and decided to wait until “just at the end for the shock.”
Now, White is weighing in.
“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 during “The Howard Stern Show” from THR. “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. […] 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 kind of a bitch move.”
White also took issue with Tapia de Veer claiming that he and the auteur “already had our last fight forever.” According to White, no such arguments took place.
“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,” White said (Tapia de Veer also claimed that White was “just saying no to anything,” including objecting to releasing the longer theme song.) “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.”
White pointed to how “The White Lotus” elevated Tapia de Veer’s career, and allegedly emboldened Tapia de Veer to mistreat White.
“By the time the third season came around, he’d won Emmys and he had his song go viral,” White said. “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. 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.”
To the NYT, Tapia de Veer did confirm that his dynamic with White changed across the course of the viral series. The first theme song for Season 1 of the series was actually created by Tapia de Veer for a Nike ad with Kanye West. Tapia de Veer then collaborated with White amid legal issues with West to adjust the tone of the track, and the rest is “White Lotus” history.
“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,” Tapia de Veer said of concluding his collaboration with White. “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.”
