Aubrey Plaza Is Leveling Up—and Still Pranking Her Costars

December 1, 2022   Comments Off on Aubrey Plaza Is Leveling Up—and Still Pranking Her Costars   Interviews

According to Aubrey Plaza, living in a five-star hotel in Sicily is not the paradise we think it is. The vibe can shift from Eloise to Jack Torrance pretty quickly. For her, it took only a month.

Last February, Plaza, along with the rest of the cast and crew of the HBO series The White Lotus, holed up at the Four Seasons San Domenico Palace for five months to film the show’s second season. The hotel, a centuries-old convent in the seaside town of Taormina, was shuttered to actual tourists so that the actors could play fictional ones. “A Charlie Kaufman experiment,” as Plaza puts it, with no retreat from work. Every time she stuck her head into the hallway, she heard “motore, motore, motore!” (“rolling” in Italian) echoing from some marbled corner of the property. Every time she returned to her room, a staffer was inside performing an unsolicited task. Eventually, she hung a do not disturb sign on the door and began blasting R.E.M. She ignored pleas from housekeeping. “I was a suspicious character for these Italians,” she says. “They thought I was sketchy. Which I am.”

Then, in March, things got weird. One of Plaza’s costars, Adam DiMarco, discovered the reed diffusers that normally scent the hotel’s nooks and terraces had been arranged in a large Blair Witch–style symbol on the floor of his dressing room. A few days later, Plaza’s dressing room was similarly defiled. Furious, she started freaking out to fellow cast members Haley Lu Richardson and Meghann Fahy. “Who did this?” she demanded. Was it a prank? A poltergeist? The ghost of a nun who, centuries later, still can’t be a priest? No one knew.

Well, the hotel staff knew. “It’s Ms. Plaza,” they agreed. They proffered security footage. Plaza swore it wasn’t her. She threw suspicion on her similarly dark-haired Italian costars. “It was Beatrice! It was Simona!” Papers with ominous messages that read here lies… were being slipped under people’s doors. “I was definitely questioning my reality for a while there,” says DiMarco. Over bottles of red wine, Plaza assured him she wasn’t to blame until eventually he recruited a mole of his own: “I didn’t know who to trust. It was like Murder on the Orient Express. Everyone was the murderer.”

But it was Ms. Plaza. Of course, it was Ms. Plaza. “She’s a disruptor by nature,” says her close friend Mike White, creator of The White Lotus. For the sake of work and self-preservation, White avoided the chaos. “Aubrey’s the most fun. I said to her face, if I’m on a cross-country trip, I want nothing more than for you to be on that bus with me. But if I’m driving the bus, and you are on it, I want you off the bus.”