Aubrey Plaza is a Hollywood brunette the way Alison Brie or Lizzy Caplan or Cristin Milioti or even Anne Hathaway is a Hollywood brunette: It’s essential to her star essence, a counterbalancing force to the industry’s overwhelming predisposition toward bottle blonde. But at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Governors Awards on November 19, the White Lotus star made like Frank Ocean and entered her blonde era. Many fans have theorized that this has to do with an upcoming role; maybe it’s a clue about what we’ll see in WandaVision spin-off Agatha: Coven of Chaos, or perhaps it’s for her role in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. I’m not so sure about that. I think it’s all a prank.
As a new interview in GQ reveals, Plaza is an incorrigible prankster who “defiled†co-stars’ dressing rooms on the set of The White Lotus. Plaza arranged reeds from the hotel’s scent diffusers “in a large Blair Witch–style symbol on the floor†for Adam DiMarco and Meghann Fahy and slid notes “with ominous messages that read here lies …â€Â under cast members’ doors. When hotel staff said they had security-camera footage of Plaza haunting the hotel, she “threw suspicion on her similarly dark-haired Italian costars. ‘It was Beatrice! It was Simona!’†Convenient, then, that she’d go blonde, probably to throw future prankees off her scent.
Okay, but actually: on-set prank culture in the year 2022? Are we still doing this? The White Lotus creator Mike White, for his part, steered clear of Plaza’s signature spoofs and goofs. “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.†And lest you think future co-stars are safe from Plaza’s razzing, she says she got in character as a “female Bond†type on the set of Guy Ritchie’s upcoming Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre by objectifying Jason Statham “the whole time. Literally slapping his butt. I think they were all scared of me. Like, who is this girl who’s coming in so hot?†Reel it in, Aubs!