Casting director Meredith Tucker and White Lotus creator Mike White have been friends and collaborators since they met in an acting class during thei
Casting director Meredith Tucker and White Lotus creator Mike White have been friends and collaborators since they met in an acting class during their freshman year at Wesleyan University. They’ve worked together on many of White’s projects, including 2007’s Year of the Dog, 2016’s Mamma Dallas, and 2017’s Brad’s Status, and she also helped out on his hit series Enlightened. Over the years, they’ve developed a shorthand that has served them well. “It makes things a little easier,” Tucker tells Vanity Fair. “I mean, it makes things a little harder too, because I don’t want to let him down.”
She definitely hasn’t disappointed with their latest collaboration: HBO’s hit The White Lotus, on which Tucker has worked for all three seasons. With its colorful characters and wild, juicy storylines, the critically acclaimed series has cultivated a slew of breakout performances from actors like Meghann Fahy, Leo Woodall, and, most recently, Patrick Schwarzenegger. It’s also juiced the careers of more established actors, such as Jennifer Coolidge and Carrie Coon. So it should come as no surprise that a lot of hopeful agents and actors are metaphorically knocking on Tucker’s door.
“I’ve been getting a lot of emails from actors that swear they’ve heard that it’s gonna shoot in Morocco, they swear it’s gonna be in Türkiye this year,” she says with a laugh. “Some people are like, ‘I’ve never acted before, but I’d really love to be on the show.’ I think because it’s so hypernaturalistic, people assume these people are not acting. But it takes tremendous skill and tremendous writing and tremendous directing to make it seem that way.”
While she can’t say anything about the upcoming season, Tucker, a five-time Emmy winner who earned hardware for The White Lotus in 2022 and 2023, had plenty to say about her work on the show—including how they cast such real-looking siblings, what she looks for in an alpha male character, and why she thinks the show appeals to so many actors.
Vanity Fair: Almost everyone has to audition for The White Lotus. Do you and Mike start with a wish list of actors for each role?
Meredith Tucker: We start working on lists, but then take a lot from the agents—especially with the younger characters. I did not know Sarah Catherine Hook before we started this process. I knew Patrick [Schwarzenegger], I knew Sam [Nivola], but I did not know Adam DiMarco before we started. So a lot of those parts really do come from auditions. Obviously, it’s not a democracy—but because the show is so popular, I do try to cast a wide net and give people the opportunity to read. Especially the adolescent people who might not have had that much professional experience.
Has the process changed a lot since the first season, when the series wasn’t as well-known as it is now?
The thing about season one—we did it very quickly, but it was one of the few things that was trying to shoot in that fall 2020 window that was actively casting. So because Michael was already established as this writer-director that people do in general clamor to work with, people were pretty enthusiastic, even from the start. Obviously, that has only grown. Season one, because it was a miniature timeline and because we were shooting in the States, we could only consider Americans. And now that we’ve gone global, the incoming can come from everywhere.
How do you go about casting siblings and families? Do you choose one person first, then cast around them?
It’s kind of crazy that it’s worked out as well as it has in the past. It’s a degree of, do these people physically look like each other? Do you buy it? We don’t do chemistry reads at all and never have. But season one, when we saw Sydney [Sweeney] and Fred [Hechinger] and Steve [Zahn] and Connie [Britton], it was like, Wow, these people really do look like a family. It really does come organically from the performances.
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