‘White Lotus’ Composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer Says He’s Done With Show After Having

The musician said he's gotten endless complaints about the score for the current season of the Max murder in paradise series.

Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sarah Catherine Hook and Sam Nivola in 'The White Lotus' season 3
Fabio Lovino/HBO
Cristóbal Tapia de Veer is checking out of The White Lotus. Permanently. The show’s composer told The New York Times that he is leaving after the current season following a string of creative disputes with show creator and director Mike White. “I feel like this was, you know, a rock ’n’ roll band story,” Tapia de Veer told the paper about the disagreements. “I was like, ‘OK, this is like a rock band I’ve been in before where the guitar player doesn’t understand the singer at all.’”

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And while he’s just now speaking out, Tapia de Veer said he’s been having creative conflicts with White since season one, as well as conversations with producers he described as verging on “hysterical” amid their reported requests that he make his themes more “upbeat and less experimental.”

He described announcing to the creative team a few months ago that he was not coming back, but not telling White for “various reasons… I wanted to tell him just at the end for the shock or whatever,” he said. Asked how White responded, Tapia de Veer said the show runner “says a lot of things” that he can’t really talk about at the moment, then described the situation as being like a scene from the 1978 French drag comedy 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,” he said. “To me, the show felt very much like that.”

He also said when he got the script for the first season he thought it was very “well-written,” but given the comedic, “reality TV kind of vibe” he thought it didn’t fit his typically “super dark and edgy” musical vibe.

“But when we had the talk with Mike, I just told him in a joke that I thought we could do some kind of ‘Hawaiian Hitchcock,’ and he really grabbed on that and he started laughing,” Tapia de Veer said, adding that White’s original temporary score had a “chill, sexy” Ibiza club vibe with “literally no edge to it” that felt like “nice background music.”

The Chilean composer who has won three Primetime Emmys for his work on the series about rich people behaving horrendously in paradise also discussed the vitriol he’s received from fans about “Enlightenment,” his radical, percussion, accordion and handclap revamp of the show’s theme song for the current Thailand-based season that has been very divisive.

For the record, Tapia de Veer said he loves his season three theme and was hoping the current run — which ends on Sunday (April 6) — would at some point include a longer version he’d written that would elide back into the more recognizable, fan-favorite melodies from the first two seasons. As for what direction he was given for this season, Tapia de Veer said there was none, so he began experimenting with a collection of Thai gongs, a Thai violin called a saw u and an Italian accordion his mom sent him that he didn’t know how to play.

The original plan, Tapia de Veer said, was to bring back the apparently beloved “ool-loo-loo-loo” vocalizations form the first two seasons in a longer version of the season three theme, “because people will explode if they realize that it was going there anyway.” He told a producer about that plan and that person thought it was a good idea. But then, he said, White cut the extended edit. “He wasn’t happy about that,” Tapia de Veer said. “I mean, at that point, we already had our last fight forever, I think. So he was just saying no to anything.”

Listen to the extended cut of The White Lotus theme that Tapia de Veer uploaded to YouTube last month below.