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Aubrey Plaza has been one of the biggest attractions in Season 2 of HBO’s White Lotus. Every time she’s on camera she steals the scene despite having maybe 20% of the dialogue of her co-stars.
Season 2 of White Lotus follows the same format as season 1. It features the lives of ultra-rich people at a tropical resort over the span of a week. Every main character is written with flaws that make you both love and detest them at times.
Aubrey Plaza is a household name from Parks and Recreation and other projects so her star shines a bit brighter than some of her lesser-known co-stars. People like actor Adam DiMarco who plays Albie Di Grasso, son of Dominic Di Grasso played by The Sopranos legend Michael Imperioli.
In a recent feature in GQ Magazine, Aubrey Plaza revealed how she’d tortured Adam DiMarco at the resort in Sicily where they filmed using witch pranks. She was so far up in his head she was pranking herself as cover. Then hotel security confirmed that it was all chaos caused by Aubrey Plaza.
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.
The 32-year-old Canadian-born Adam DiMarco must’ve been ready to lose his mind. Then when there was a similar disturbance in Aubrey’s room it must’ve been a relief. But the spooky witch pranks continued until the hotel narc’d on Aubrey with security footage:
“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.”
Mike White who created The White Lotus and who is a good friend of Aubrey Plaza was quick to throw her under the bus as well. He called her “a disruptor by nature” and used an analogy about if he was driving a bus he doesn’t want her on it but if he’s riding on the bus he wants to be with her.
This is the biggest role Adam DiMarco has landed so far in his career. He’s previously appeared in 14 episodes of The Magicians and 20 episodes of The Order, but nothing with the global profile and hype of The White Lotus.
So while it had to freak him out to find the Blair Witch stuff on his hotel room floor it must’ve felt good a few days (weeks?) later when the truth was revealed. It was definitely an act of chaos but also an act of bringing him into the fold.