On this episode, host Evan Ross Katz focuses on the life and career of the man who responsible for The White Lotus: Mike White. He talks to Mike about growing up as an aspiring playwright, the part religion played in his upbringing and his point of view, and the pros and pressures of wearing so many hats. Evan also chats with some of the people who know Mike best, including casting director Meredith Tucker, actress Molly Shannon, his fellow Survivor contestants Angelina Keeley and Alec Merlino, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Mike White and what is his significance?
Hi, everyone. I'm Evan Ross Katz, and welcome to the final Look Back episode of The White Lotus official podcast from HBO. I know, bittersweet. Mike White, the show's writer, director, and creator, was a success story in Hollywood long before The White Lotus. He'd made movies and television and had even competed on reality shows.
But he was catapulted to a whole new echelon of stardom in 2021 when The White Lotus made him a household name. By that point, I'd been covering pop culture and entertainment for over a decade. I knew that nobody was doing it quite like him. One thing that makes Mike's projects so distinctly Mike White is that he tends to work as a one-stop shop, an anomaly in Hollywood.
Most TV these days is made by teams. Scripts are crafted by writers' rooms and a roster of directors tackle each season of episodes. Given the array of talent, it's sometimes hard to tell which ideas come from where or who to credit for what. But Mike, he spins all those plates, all on his own.
So today, for our grand finale, we're taking a step back to a pre-White Lotus era to retrace the work and life experiences that shaped Mike's earlier career. Because to understand the White Lotus, you have to understand Mike White. Mike's story starts in the 1970s in the foothills of Pasadena near Sierra Madre Eaton Canyon, just a five-minute walk from the forest.
Chapter 2: What influenced Mike White's upbringing and early career?
I was living in the suburbs. I was up in like the foothills of Pasadena and I was bored a lot. I kind of think I built out an imaginative world because I was under stimulated in a sense. I wasn't weird because I, I mean, I'm sure I was weird, but I wasn't like a social misfit in the classic way that you might expect me to be.
I was now bino, practically, growing up in Southern California with a bunch of surfer buddies and skateboarder buddies. You know, I wasn't somebody who, like, smoked pot and wanted to listen to Bob Marley and chill. I was like, I'd get stoned and my mind would be hypermental and I would be wanting to write stuff or think about things and whatever.
Mike's father, Mel White, was a minister and deeply embedded in the local Christian community. As such, religion played an integral role in Mike's upbringing.
When I was little, I was a good, God-fearing kid. My parents sent me to a secular school, which was their great error, because I realized, like, I went to, like, this preppy school with a lot of rich kids, and... I didn't want to be those kids, but I could tell they had better shoes. I could tell they had better toys. I could tell they had better summer vacations.
And then I would go back to the religious community that I was in where they were like all wearing polyester pants and like, I don't know, we'd have Bible camp. And I was just like, this is lame. I went to Bible summer camp and I thought I was possessed by the devil because I couldn't, you know, they'd be like, go find Jesus and accept Jesus into your heart.
And then like, I'd go out into the night and I'd be like, Jesus never showed up. So I was just like, maybe I'm Satan's spawn or something.
He received an introduction to playwriting at a young age by his second grade teacher, who happened to be the mother of the playwright and actor Sam Shepard. Very, very L.A.
I bought his play when I was young and I got really into the way plays were written on the... I was just into words and plays and I don't know. So I had a pretty imaginative life and I would try to get the kids at school to reenact Airport 77 on the bleachers. Just always trying to make things more interesting than just playing tag or whatever the fuck they were into.
When I was young, I really wanted to be older and sophisticated, and I got a subscription to The New Yorker and would read Pauline Kael reviews, and I was just a little precocious in ways that I'm not even anymore. As I became an adult, I just cared less about being an adult.
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Chapter 3: How did Mike White's university years shape his career?
I didn't think I was necessarily going to be in the movie business or whatever, but I thought maybe I'd be like a playwright in New York City, like Edward Albee.
Mike went on to attend Wesleyan University, a liberal arts college in Connecticut. Culturally, it was a sea change.
Wesleyan was a lot of liberal Jewish kids from New York. And I mean, and there was lots beyond that, but it was just a very stimulating group of people. They were just more interested in some of the cultural stuff that I was into kind of on my own in Pasadena. And just they're very engaged with the world. You know, a lot of activists, a lot of people talking philosophy and theory.
And it was great as as far as like a budding playwright. because it gave me a space to just do the stuff I wanted to do. They just had a place where I could get people together and put on little stuff and develop a voice. I mean, the people that I met at Wesleyan are still some of the good friends I have to this day, including Meredith.
During his freshman spring at Wesleyan, Mike met Meredith Tucker in an acting class. She was a history major while Mike was studying theater. Meredith would go on to become a casting director and eventually cast The White Lotus. But before all that, they were theater buddies.
He's a really good actor. And one thing about all this writing is that he's not acting anymore. But I remember end of our sophomore year, they did Our Town and he played the choir master, the drunken choir master. And I remember there was one scene, it was a silent scene. He's like walking across stage and the guy was a drunkard. I just remember, I was like, that guy is a great actor.
And everyone knew, like, you kind of knew. Like, he was just so much more talented than the rest of us, and just so much more interesting than the rest of us. And what was interesting is he had all these older women theater majors who were, like, gobbed onto him, because I think they clearly knew. He was friends with all, like, the senior and junior actresses. And I
Like everyone kind of saw that he was going places. We had a review show sophomore year and I was in his number. It was Broadway Baby. I was like a homeless woman who's harassing theater goers. I still remember, I could do the monologue that he wrote beforehand, but I will spare you all now. I joke that I knew back in like 1989 to like grab onto his coattails and never let go.
He's been so good to me. I mean, he's changed my life, you know, both professionally and personally.
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Chapter 4: What impact did 'Chuck and Buck' have on Mike White's career?
And then the movie came out and like, you know, Entertainment Weekly named it the best movie of the year of the year it came out. And it was also for me, like it made me go, okay, I can actually express myself in this medium and I should go with my gut and, and I should keep trying to develop that voice and not just be a writer for hire.
Because at the time I had written on Dawson's Creek and Freaks and Geeks, and I had a knack for being able to write other kinds of things. And so it was like, to me, that was probably the thing that made me double down on myself, I guess.
Mike went on to write a bunch more movies in his developing voice, including Orange County, The Good Girl, and his biggest hit to date, School of Rock, in which Mike played the unforgettable Ned Schneebly.
Just dump her, man. Yeah, well, if you don't come up with some money, she's going to dump me. She's fed up. Really? Because that would be a good thing. She's a nightmare.
Come on. I may never have another girlfriend. I mean, just come on.
In 2004, he came out with Cracking Up, a sitcom on Fox about a wacky rich family in Beverly Hills. Molly Shannon played the mom.
Mike and I met for coffee in New York City. This was years ago, before I had kids. And we just got along so well. We went out for iced coffee downtown. And then we just kept walking and talking and walking and talking. And he was like, yeah, I think you're too young to play the mom in Cracking Up. You're too young. But we just got along as friends. It was just like an instant click. It was great.
But then he came back around and was like, actually, I think you would be great to play the mom in Cracking Up. So then he cast me as the mom. I remember I saw an actress on an airplane. She's like, oh, you're so lucky. Every –
actress wanted that part of the mom on cracking up that's like the best part because she was like a pill-popping alcoholic with a complicated marriage and so they have a therapist that moves into their house to help them with their kids and their family dynamics and I remember thinking yeah I feel so lucky I got this great part it just it was just the greatest job ever
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Chapter 5: How did Mike White transition from movies to TV shows?
Enlightened kind of felt like a secret shared amongst the people that I really respected and admired. Like, oh my gosh, have you seen Enlightened? You haven't seen anything until you've seen Enlightened. To call it an office dramedy sounds too reductive, almost, because the show really blossoms and blooms in so many really emotional ways.
Laura Dern plays this woman who's just teetering on the edge of a breakdown, and she comes back to work after a breakdown. And you see her trying to build new friendships, trying to make her life feel as big on the outside as it does maybe to her internally.
There's one really incredible scene where Laura Dern has this whole monologue about how she has this renewed sense of empathy for her mother because she acknowledges that her mother was also once a child and that she has to kind of mother both of them in this very prickly, difficult dynamic between the two of them.
I will stop waiting for you to be the perfect mother I will be patient with you
And the fact that Mike White was able to capture that so personally and also so viscerally, like the rage of like, why can't you be the mother I wanted you to be? But also, I'm not the daughter that you wanted probably either. I mean, really, it's like some of the best writing on television I've seen ever.
Between Enlightened and The White Lotus, you can just see how specific the vision is across any kind of setting. Enlightened kind of feels very far from White Lotus, and yet they both feel like they're made from the same specific brain. That is, you know, the mark of someone who I think is, like, really good at what they do.
Laura Dern feels like she's doing a good thing and, like, really desperately wants to do a good thing, and that's what makes that so tragic. You can feel how much she wants to improve herself and improve everyone else, but she just keeps bucking up against this wall of everyone else's ego. But she's still trying, whereas on the White Lotus, I think this desire to...
change others is much more out of control and dominance.
Enlightened ran for two seasons before getting canceled, much to the disappointment of fans. I'm still mad.
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Chapter 6: What was the significance of 'Enlightened' in Mike White's career?
When he's not maybe one of the most astute, I don't know, observationists in working in television, which I would be like, target on your back immediately. You're too good at this game. I think he's so good at like playing sweet, but also playing very cunning, but also not being too cunning, but also being very playful, friendly.
And I mean, honestly, if you've talked to anyone who's directed actors, that sounds like exactly what you need to do.
They're seemingly strange bedfellows, Survivor and The White Lotus. And yet I feel like they are a great double feature. Do you see similarities between the two shows?
Absolutely. I mean, Survivor, first of all, let me say this. When I... started watching Survivor, I thought it was a show that you watched in the hospital. I thought this was a show that you watched on your deathbed. Plug is about to be pulled and Survivor is just on. I thought it was like daytime TV. But when I started watching this series, I was like, oh my gosh.
There are so many social dynamics, physical dynamics, of course. But the way that you can start an episode on the bottom and end, not on the top, but at the top of the middle, which is exactly where you want to be. And that's kind of where he rode the
throughout the entire season, which is perfect because you want to be someone on Survivor who is seen as not a weakness, but also a huge competitor for someone at the very end. You want to be the person they bring along with them, but you also don't want to be someone that it's like, oh, I can cut you easily and not feel like I'm losing a real vote.
And that I think is that's really the mark of a genius. Honestly, that means more to me than Mensa.
For those of you who are familiar with my work, you might know that my dedication to Survivor goes way beyond fandom. I'm a connoisseur of the show. I even have my own podcast dedicated to it called Drop Your Buffs. You could say I'm kind of obsessive. So when I knew we'd be talking about Mike's time on Survivor, there were two people I absolutely knew we had to get.
Your character had a name, though. He did. Like, that's a big deal.
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Chapter 7: How are 'Enlightened' and 'The White Lotus' connected?
I was American Woman number two, okay? I was nameless.
Angelina Keely and Alec Merlino both joined Mike during the David vs. Goliath season of Survivor. The three of them kept in touch afterward. So much so that Mike actually invited Alec to appear on season one of The White Lotus in a small role, and then invited Angelina, as well as another cast member, Cara, onto season two. But before that, they were just strangers meeting on an island.
I remember getting off the little, you know when we paddle on the raft and we all get off and we can finally talk to each other? People are kind of sizing each other up and... Mike never stood out, not in a bad way. No one stood out. And then it was a week in, someone mentioned, do you know who that is? And I said, no. And they're like, have you ever seen School of Rock?
And I'm like, oh, Ned Schneebly. And then that was that. You know, I didn't know like how much he had written. I didn't really know to what extent who he was until I got to the White Lotus. And then I'm like, oh dang, like this guy's a big deal. He's in charge. Everyone goes to Mike. I'm like, dang, he's like the king.
Kingpin Mike. I feel like this is gonna be, this needs to be a nickname. Mike's game was, So social. He and Kara, I think, were the best social players of our season, hands down. He had a way of cutting through the game and transcending it and making you feel like a human again and not just a player who's playing this competitive game.
He and I connected about our French bulldogs, about being vegan and vegetarian. And Mike did such a good job of kind of like laying low. Like he, I think he knew that for the people who knew of his stardom, he wanted to kind of like temper that with like just being a really laid back person. And he is laid back. So I think that naturally came out.
As pals of Mike, alums of Survivor, and devoted fans of The White Lotus, both Angelina and Alec can easily spot the parallels between these two shows.
It's the little quirks that make people who they are, right? It's like the big personalities. It's like people being funny and being people, but also this weird, like... competition and how do I get up on someone else and how do I win, right? They're both about winning.
I remember one time he laughed. He goes, the more I wash the White Lotus, the more I realize it's exactly like Survivor. Like if you think about classic Survivor, it's like always in between parts, they cut to the B-roll of like the shark and then like in the White Lotus, they cut to B-roll of just like this like ominous like ocean. You're like, oh, what are they setting up?
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