Leave it up to Aubrey Plaza to turn a gorgeous Italian seaside town into a nightmare.
“The White Lotus” star really committed to a terrifying prank she decided to play on her co-star Adam DiMarco while they were filming at the Four Seasons San Domenico Palace for five months in Taormina, Sicily.
“I was definitely questioning my reality for a while there,” DiMarco, who plays Albie in Season 2, told GQ in a profile about Plaza published Monday.
Plaza drew inspiration for her elaborately orchestrated shenanigans from the hotel they were staying in, which was initially a centuries-old convent that was apparently also haunted.
One day, Plaza took reed diffusers that the hotel used and left “a ‘Blair Witch’–style” symbol on DiMarco’s dressing room floor. She also slipped notes “with ominous messages that read ‘here lies’” under people’s doors.
To cover her tracks, Plaza defiled her dressing room in the same fashion that she creepified DiMarco’s — and then pretended to be completely freaked out by it, demanding to know who did it.
Although Plaza was successfully gaslighting her co-stars, the hotel staff — who Plaza said thought she was a “suspicious character” and “sketchy” — were pretty convinced it was her. They even checked security footage to prove it. But when they spotted a brunette in the footage, Plaza blamed her co-stars Beatrice Grannò (Mia) and Simona Tabasco (Lucia).
DiMarco was so entrenched in Plaza’s lie that he even admitted that figuring out who was doing this to him “was like ‘Murder on the Orient Express.’”
“Adam was so innocent, like a baby bird,” Plaza told GQ of the incident. “It was really sick what I was doing to him. I got him to the brink of a psychological break.”
Plaza’s prank may have also benefited from DiMarco’s belief that something paranormal was happening in the hotel.
Last month, DiMarco told GQ that he shared the same spooky dream as his co-star Jon Gries (Greg Hunt) while staying at the Four Seasons.
“There’s this bald man who was walking back and forth and approached the foot of our bed and grabbed us,” DiMarco told the magazine at the time.
“I woke up screaming, and I didn’t really think anything of it until Jon mentioned his story,” DiMarco said. “It was just so weird that the stories corroborated so cleanly.”
To read the Plaza profile in full, head over to GQ.