The White Lotus Composer Is Beefing With Mike White

Composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer is checking out of the White Lotus. After working on the HBO show’s score for three seasons — and producing an absolute banger of a theme song — Tapia de Veer has quit The White Lotus, citing creative disagreements with Mike White, the show’s creator and director.

Tapia de Veer described their relationship to the New York Times as a “rock ‘n’ roll band story” in which the guitar player and the singer don’t exactly get along, and he compared it to the 1978 film La Cage aux Folles: “You know how there’s Albin, which is like the star, and there’s Renato, who is the producer who is always taking care that Albin doesn’t lose his mind about something, because Albin is the diva and Renato is the guy who is trying to make everything work. To me, the show felt very much like that.”

The composer says their feud began during season one when his “super dark and edgy” style did not match what the creative team wanted — a more upbeat, clubby vibe someone would listen to in, say, Ibiza. Instead, he stuck to his vision and composed the weird, edgy music we hear in the show, rather than the “chill, sexy” vibe White desired. I may be in the wrong here, but season two’s theme is exactly something I’d want to listen to while clubbing on a Spanish island. But that’s just me.

Season three’s theme took a turn, removing the recurring ooh-loo-loo-loo melody that had made the score famous in the first place. After viewers reacted negatively, Tapia de Veer texted one of the producers and said he wanted to give fans a longer version that included the old melody. “He thought it was a good idea. But then Mike cut that — he wasn’t happy about that,” he said. Instead of waiting for White’s blessing, he decided to put it out anyway. “I mean, at that point, we already had our last fight forever, I think. So he was just saying no to anything,” he said. “So I just uploaded that to my YouTube.”

Three Emmys later, Tapia de Veer said he has no regrets. “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,” he said, adding that he’s proud he never gave up. “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 — did those Emmys, people going crazy.”

While I’ll miss Tapia de Veer’s haunting music, this feud has me dreaming up possible tensions for the next season of The White Lotus. But knowing White, he has probably already worked it in.

The Cut has reached out to HBO for comment and will update this post if we hear back.