Screenwriter, director, actor, Survivor/Amazing Race contestant, and Wesleyan grad Mike White ’92 spent the first year and a half of the pandemic creating “The White Lotus.” The star-studded HBO mini-series follows a variety of characters through a week at the White Lotus resort in Hawaii, addressing issues of class and colonialism through a comedic murder-mystery. “The White Lotus” was quick to gain critical and public acclaim after its release in July of 2021. As a big fan of the show and his work in general—including “School of Rock” (2003), “Freaks and Geeks” (1999), “Beatriz at Dinner” (2017), and “Nacho Libre” (2006)—I spoke with Mike to hear his perspective on the highly-debated social commentary of “The White Lotus,” life at Wesleyan, and the current season of “Survivor.”

The Argus: So, since you’re a Wesleyan grad, I wanted to start off by asking about your time at Wesleyan. What was your major? What were you interested in?

Mike White: Well, just to give some context, I was an English and theater double major. I was at Wes from ’88 to ’92. I went to a very homogenous little school for rich ritzy-titzy kids in Pasadena. So my school focused on, like, all-around athlete/scholars who were good at science, and I always felt sort of like an artsy freak and, in terms of my interests, I didn’t really have a lot in common with my friends at school. I was just reading weird Edward Albee plays and putting on plays in my backyard. So I got to Wesleyan and I was like, “Okay, these are my people.” And that actually turned out to be the case because my closest friends [today] are people that I befriended at Wesleyan. It was just, like, all of these hipster, New York, Jewish kids who already knew all the lingo and had their looks down, and I was so intimidated by all of them. I always felt like I was scaring people with my California friendliness. They were all real cool and smoked cigarettes, and I was just a dork on a fork, and yet I still like them all.

But once you get past the surface differences, I realized there were a lot of people who had interests that were similar to mine. I had a great time at Wesleyan. I loved being able to take classes and things that I was interested in. And of course, I smoked a lot of weed and I got a lot out of that. You had to drag me out of there. I still think that if I died, heaven would look somehow like a liberal arts college where everybody got to take classes all day and stimulate themselves intellectually. 

A: How did your creative juices get flowing at Wesleyan? Did you know you wanted to work in Hollywood and start writing?

MW: I had an interest in theater and writing and movies. I felt like at Wesleyan, I actually had an opportunity. There were classes that I could actually take and feel like I wasn’t just doing it on my own. I started to develop more of a “voice” and started writing scenes and then putting [them] on with actual actors. I double-majored in English and theater as a way to combine the two because I was interested in writing for theater, writing dialogue specifically, and telling stories through that. By the end of college, I was ready to be a starving playwright in New York but then fell into the wrong crowd with some L.A. Wes grads.

A: To shift more into “White Lotus,” because it hasn’t left my mind since I watched it, what inspired you to write it? What drew you towards this particular type of show that combined comedy with class commentary?

MW: Well, a lot of it was just circumstantial. HBO had a lot of shows shut down because of COVID, and they were desperate to have more content. I think they know that I’m pretty fast and have more of a playwriting background, so I like to have characters just sitting around tables and talking. It wouldn’t need a lot of complicated set pieces and long shoots that would be at risk for a potential COVID shutdown. So they came to me like, “Can you come up with something?” At the time I was stuck at my house, watching Trump unravel the world and feeling very helpless. I just was like, “I’ve got to get out of here.” The idea of going to a hotel in Hawaii or somewhere nice sounded great to me, so I ended up writing about characters that I don’t tend to usually write about, like rich attractive people sitting around pools. I thought it would be kind of fun to write something with the trappings of a rich soap but do it in my voice. I wanted to poke the bear and play with cultural stuff, so that’s how I built the show into that.

A: You’re credited as a creator, writer, producer, and director. What was your experience taking on all of those roles?

MW: I mean, honestly, it happened because of necessity. The whole thing had to be cross-boarded, which basically just means that you’d go from a scene in episode one to a scene in episode six in the same day. And that was the only way we could actually get through it. It just made more sense for me to direct it all. But honestly, I’m old now. I’ve been doing this a long time, and even though it’s exhausting, it’s easier for me to be the interpreter of my own stuff. Sometimes it’s harder to try to manipulate directors into doing what you want them to do. It was exhausting but pretty fun. I don’t think I would have done it under any other circumstances because usually, I don’t like working very hard.

I think that COVID-19 made me realize I don’t really want to just sit around my house for the rest of my life, which is what I thought I wanted to do prior to that. When it actually was happening, I realized I wasn’t good with that. Maybe it was also because the world felt like it was falling apart. So I decided I’d rather work my ass off and kill myself through work [rather] than sit here and just kill myself in front of, like, Don Lemon.

A: I thought it was interesting that you mentioned “poking the bear,” because that was exactly the effect the show had on me and my family when we watched it together over the summer. We were sitting there bickering after watching it, because everyone in my family had a different opinion about who was the worst character in the show. My mom thought [it was] Paula, but I think Connie Britton’s character is worse than Paula. My dad went in a totally different direction. I realized that every character kind of sucks, and what was more interesting than arguing about it was seeing who everyone chose. I’m wondering if that’s what you were going for, something without a clear hero or villain. Did you set out with a specific critique in mind, or did it come out through your characters?

MW: I think the best way to answer that is to talk about what I feel like art or storytelling is supposed to do. There are limits on the critique of white privilege written by a white, privileged man, and I obviously have political opinions; I have opinions about cultural things that are happening, but I don’t see myself as a cultural critic in that way. I see myself as a storyteller, and I feel like [what] I’m actually good at is listening to people. And thinking about [how] what people say doesn’t always reflect what they do, and how they talk is not necessarily what they think. I feel like the purpose of art is not necessarily moral pedagogy. It’s more like hanging out with a person who has a hodgepodge of thoughts. There is no message. So to me, I feel like when I’m successful, it’s when I get the reactions that I did get from “White Lotus,” which is when it’s the beginning of a conversation. People can extrapolate different things, and it can be a Rorschach test of how people see. In a way, the way that they respond says more about them; it says as much about them as it does about the piece. It’s more interesting if it works on those kinds of levels. If we wanted to tell Paula’s story, she’s this well-meaning activist who tries to do a Robin Hood-like move to make things right. I could engineer it that she’s the most sympathetic and all of the other characters are these evil people who’re a part of this colonial history. I feel like I could do that, but that doesn’t feel true to life or true to my experience. I want to be compassionate and try to be able to see it from each of the characters’ points of view, but I don’t want to necessarily come down exactly on anyone’s side.

But I also feel like I get a lot of criticism, especially when people look at it through the prism of activism and say that the purpose of art is to have a message and not to muddle the message. That’s just the opposite of how I approach things. I have to take the criticism because clearly people have that criticism, but it’s a mischievous impulse, making art. I don’t necessarily want to be the good boy. I want to do something that is a little bit tweaked, and so I expect to get a spectrum of reactions, and I can live with it. I want people to like me, but they don’t have to love me.

A: I love the metaphor of the show as a Rorschach test. That’s a perfect descriptor. Because I didn’t feel like the show was preaching at me. My own background felt clearly reflected onto my reaction to the show.

MW: My feeling is that a lot of shows that get into thorny cultural issues right now end up reflecting the landscape of how television or series are being made right now. There are a lot of them being made by these big corporations, like Apple and Amazon. Their shows end up being like commercials for their own products; they don’t really have an interest in poking the bear. They are the bear, you know? I think that there’s a fear of that. There’s not a big upside to taking risks that could stoke a certain type of controversy. That’s the part that annoys me because I feel like it has less to do with some kind of principled position, which I can take. It’s just more of a corporate woke-ism, and I hate to use the phrase woke, but it’s like a corporate carefulness in the guise of, like, “aren’t we inclusive?” It’s really just coming from a fear, and I just find that doesn’t make great art. It just doesn’t make interesting products. Art should be debated. It’s good when it’s festive and fiery or whatever.

A: One thing that I heard a lot of people pointing out was the books that Paula and Olivia were reading throughout the show. Did you pick those out? Are you a big critical theory fan? 

MW: Haha, I’ve tried to go back to some of that stuff now after college, but my brain is, like, atrophied. I’m watching too much freaking dumb TV at this point.

But yes, I picked out the books. Many of them were books I remember reading when I was in college. I was afraid to get trendy, of-the-moment books. As much as people had issues with Olivia and Paula, I kind of like them. I wanted their books to show that they’re kind of hard to categorize or just put into a cultural stereotype. I wanted them to be reading a range of books similar to what I was reading when I was in college. So they may be a little dated in the sense that I don’t know if people are still reading everything I included.

I remember when I did “Freaks and Geeks,” one day James Franco would have, like, “The Complete Works of Baudelaire.” And then the next day it was Nietzsche. And I was always thinking, “Did you finish the Baudelaire? I don’t know how you whipped through that so fast.” So, yeah, you wonder how much they’re really reading these books.

A: I know you’re a huge fan of “Survivor,” as am I, and you played a few seasons ago. Was there any sort of connection between your love of “Survivor” and “The White Lotus?” 

MW: If there is a connection on that level, it was definitely unconscious. I do realize looking back, it does follow [the] structure of “Survivor.” There are people from all kinds of different backgrounds all in this one location, and you know someone’s going to be gone when it’s all over. Someone’s going to get sacrificed. Also, some of the music choices and this sense of foreboding, even though it’s just really people sitting around talking and you just feel like, “Why is this so over cooked?” So I feel like there is definitely some aesthetic connection because I have watched “Survivor” for 20 years now. It was not necessarily intentional, but probably speaks to my own pleasures of what I have been watching with “Survivor.”

A: And lastly, I’m wondering what your thoughts are on the new season [of “Survivor”]. I read an article saying Jeff Probst has been going to you for advice on where to take the show.

MW: I’ve really been liking it. I feel like what I loved about “Survivor” initially and what I still think is cool about it is the part that is kind of universal: how it relates to surviving Hollywood or surviving corporate life or surviving school, or how we navigate through the world and try to succeed and still have people root for you. It’s about how aggressive you can be, or who ends up succeeding in life, and who ends up blowing up their game. But I feel like sometimes when there are too many twists and when you’re basically reacting to the little levers that the producers are pushing, it makes it less analogous to life. I don’t like when they throw in those little devices, and I felt like it might be going in that direction. You know, one guy has one-third of an idol and he has to speak some weird gibberish at tribal council to send a message, and then he doesn’t get to vote. And I was like, “Nobody can relate to this situation.”

I like it when it’s kind of a player-generated drama. My season, we had that girl who just wanted someone else’s jacket. It’s the little stuff where you think to yourself, “I just can’t,” that takes it to the next level. Where it starts to reveal just the craziness of human nature is when I think it’s a pretty sublime show, you know?

Sophie Penn can be reached at sepenn@wesleyan.edu.