‘Nothing Is Too Much’: The Italian Fever Dream of ‘The White Lotus’ Season 2

Sarah Shachat

August 15, 2023 at 2:00 PM·8 min read

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Nothing is free in the world of “The White Lotus” — not even Mike White‘s beloved breakfast buffets come without confronting the frayed nerves, petty arguments, and thwarted yearnings of rich people on vacation. But not least among the pleasures of the HBO series’ second season is what changes in the move from Hawaii to Sicily. There’s a specifically European romance reflected in the look of the show and an at-times feverish rhythm to how its different plot lines fit together, bounce off each other, or both.

The show’s lush, ostentatious Italian setting allows for the same thing its predecessor did: a bunch of rich people, their hangers-on, and the folks who have to deal with them to all lose their minds in one way or another. The challenge for both the production and post teams on the series was to create an enveloping and aspirational sense of Italian luxury that comments on the characters’ all-too-human foibles. As costume designer Alex Bovaird told IndieWire, “We would have an expression in the costume department that nothing is too much for ‘The White Lotus.'”

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Whether it is the score’s playful piano bringing the characters’ desires down to the level of mice; the costumes accentuating the gulf between who the characters want to be and who they are, or the edit finding just the right glance or micro-expression to undercut what the characters say, each piece of the worldbuilding behind “The White Lotus” Season 2 offers a perspective that shifts between objective and subjective with the strength of a Mediterranean tide.

In the videos below, watch composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer, editor John M. Valerio, and costume designer Bovaird break down how they brought specifically Italian flavor to their work this season and how wild it allowed them to be in the show’s most charged moments.

The Score of ‘The White Lotus’

White Lotus - Score - Craft Considerations

Composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer originally was only supposed to tweak the show’s main theme to give it appropriately operatic, Italian Renaissance vibes. But in creating a Euro-club remix of the Season 1 opening titles, de Veer himself fell back into the world of “The White Lotus,” creating a score that acts almost like a character in its own right: rolling its eyes, giggling, or groaning along with the audience.

“What I like about any movie or any show is when the score is somehow more than a tapestry, something to fill the void between the words,” Tapia de Veer said. “The score [in ‘The White Lotus’] is very much like a character that is playing around with the other characters in the show.”

Tapia de Veer really got to embrace a sense of play in Season 2. The introduction of more acoustic instruments and a more persistent, more classical piano allowed Tapia de Veer to bring the characters and their desires down to size rather than injecting a sense of animalistic unease into a Hawaiian paradise. “It’s funny and light and playful, and it sounds like you’re playing with just two fingers, like a kid on the piano,” Tapia de Veer said of one the season’s core themes. “There’s a bit of a game going on. And they act a little bit like children too, all these people.”

In the video above, watch Tapia de Veer break down how the score adjusted to a more playful, Italian mode while still commenting on the characters and creeping in at their most selfish moments.

The Editing ‘The White Lotus’

White Lotus - Editing - Craft Considerations

The collaboration between White’s direction, the actors’ performances, and John M. Valerio’s editing rhythm allows “The White Lotus” to be a lot of things at once. Valerio, along with editor Heather Persons, is ultimately the final arbiter of the characters’ intentions and choices. How long a shot lingers and how quickly a cut comes intuitively give us a sense of how and when characters know something is wrong, what motivates their decisions, and ultimately hints at what they might do beyond the frame. Valerio treats the work of highlighting both the characters’ good and bad qualities almost like a puzzle: It’s all about clicking the right pieces together at the right time.

The sense of timing was especially important to the show’s final episode and the fate of Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge). “There was always the discussion of, number one, when does Tanya really know something’s going on? And then the other question we talked about was when do we reveal that her suspicions are correct?” Valerio said. Valerio wanted to hold out on the viewer for as long as possible before confirming that, in the immortal word of Tanya McQuade, “These gays are trying to murder [her.]” The hovering sense of dread animates everything on the boat, but it’s that smidge of hope that Tanya’s being paranoid, according to Valerio, that keeps the viewer hooked — until the shots start firing.

In the video above, watch Valerio explain how he modulates tension, emotion, and the presence of the landscape itself as part of the dance that makes “The White Lotus” so much fun to watch.

The Costumes of ‘The White Lotus’

White Lotus - Costume Design - Craft Considerations

There are some contemporary series that do not want the viewer to think too hard about the clothes the characters wear, but “The White Lotus” is not one of them, “We would have an expression in the costume department that nothing is too much for ‘The White Lotus,'” costumer designer Alex Bovaird said.

But Bovaird delighted in pushing the costumes to be too much in a very different direction for Season 2 from the de rigeur Hawaiian shirts of Season 1. Given the rather romantic ideas that a lot of the characters have about Italy, Bovaird picked out clothes that were a little bit more dressed up and even aspirational for most of the hotel guests. The storytelling work the costumes do is often highlighting the difference between the more glamorous versions of themselves that the characters want to be and who they actually are.

Nowhere is that clearer than in Bovaird’s eclectic wardrobe for Portia (Haley Lu Richardson). “She is typical Gen Z, [like] a lot of the girls that I see in California dressed with this haphazard mismatching style where they’re trying on a lot of trends at once or one day, they’ll come in dressed in a certain way, and the next day they’ve got a completely different look,” Bovaird said. “So Portia has lots of different vibes and sometimes puts on a little too much and other times she’s depressed. She hasn’t really gotten herself together to go to dinner or breakfast. So her outfits were deliberately off and chaotic, but also very reflective of what the shops are selling to young girls. There’s Barbiecore one minute and goth the next.”

In the video above, watch Bovaird dissect the specific trends and references she infused into the costumes of “The White Lotus” Season 2 and how they get us to feel about each of the characters.