The White Lotus composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer has won the award for best original main title theme music at the 2025 Creative Arts Emmy Awards following a public falling out with the show’s creator Mike White. The win marks de Veer’s third Emmy for the HBO drama, which he’s scored since its premiere in 2021.
In April, de Veer told The New York Times that he would not be returning for the series’ fourth season, saying, “I announced to the [editorial] team a few months ago that I was not coming back, that I was leaving. … At some point, [White] heard about that.”
According to de Veer, he and White butted heads over the show’s opening theme song, specifically the “ooh-loo-loo-loos” that were a part of the season one track. In season three, the sound was removed from the series’ opening credit music, but was still featured on the full version of the track, with de Veer admitting, “I just stuck to what I was doing. And when I was giving versions, it was still the same thing.”
Days after de Veer’s New York Times story ran, White responded to the article in an interview with Howard Stern, saying, “I honestly don’t know what happened, except now I’m reading his interviews because he decides to do some PR campaign about him leaving the show. I don’t think he respected me. He wants people to know that he’s edgy and dark and I’m, I don’t know, like I watch reality TV. We never really even fought. He says we feuded. I don’t think I ever had a fight with him — except for maybe some emails. It was basically me giving him notes. I don’t think he liked to go through the process of getting notes from me, or wanting revisions, because he didn’t respect me. I knew he wasn’t a team player and that he wanted to do it his way. I was thrown that he would go to The New York Times to shit on me and the show three days before the finale. It was kind of a bitch move.”
For his part, de Veer noted his reluctance to take notes from White in the Times, saying, “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 — [won] those Emmys, people going crazy [for the show],” he said. “That is the main thing that I’m most happy about — 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 … This was a good struggle.”
De Veer won Emmys for both best music composition and best original main title music in 2022 and best music composition in 2023 for The White Lotus, which received a total of 23 Emmy nominations overall this year. The 2025 award for best music composition went to Severance.
The 2025 Creative Arts Emmy Awards are held on Saturday, Sept. 6 and Sunday, Sept. 7 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. Check out the full list of winners here.