Miss CONGENIAL ITY

The famously deadpan Aubrey Plaza is leveling up with a star turn in the new season of The White Lotus and a mega Francis Ford Coppola project on the horizon.

- PHOEBE REILLY 

ACCORDING To Aubrey Plaza, living in a five-star hotel is not the paradise you might think.  The vibe can shift from Eloise to Jack Torrance pretty quickly. That’s what happened this February, when Plaza, along with the rest of the cast and crew of the HBO series The White Lotus, holed up in a seaside inn in Sicily to film the show’s second season. The property was shuttered to actual tourists so that the actors could play the vacationers. 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!” the Italian equivalent of rolling”) echoing from some corner of the property. Eventually, she hung a“Do Not Disturb” sign on the door. 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 Blair Witch-style symbol on the floor of his dressing room. A few days later, Plaza’s dressing room was similarly defiled. Who did this?” she asked fellow cast members. Was it a prank? A poltergeist? No one knew.