The White Lotus: Aubrey Plaza's Method For Acting Drunk Is So Simple It's Genius
"The White Lotus" followed up its breakout first season with an even more tightly wound Season 2, following another luxury hotel full of horrible rich people with nothing better to do than unravel their own lives against the backdrop of the Italian coast. One of the highlights of the ensemble cast was undoubtedly Aubrey Plaza as Harper Spiller, a sharp-as-tacks lawyer whose husband Ethan (Will Sharpe) is newly wealthy and dangerously under the sway of his college friend, Cameron (Theo James).
Plaza's character spends a solid amount of time getting drunk on "The White Lotus" as doubts about her marriage send her into a self-destructive spiral. According to Plaza, drunk acting comes quite naturally to her, but she has a shockingly simple trick to make it even more realistic.
Speaking to Vanity Fair, Plaza explained her process for playing drunk in scenes like Harper's wine-fueled trip to an Italian vineyard, where she twists verbal knives into her husband and his friends, the alcohol bringing out her cruelest impulses. "I have a kind of sense memory approach and I do a lot of research," Plaza said. "So, I know what it feels like to be very, very drunk and I conjure up those moments and I relive them over and over again."
But she's got another trick up her sleeve, too: literally making herself dizzy. "And then I do a physical exercise," she explained. "Sometimes, I, like, spin around in circles."
Aubrey Plaza drunk acts by spinning in circles
Aubrey Plaza's surefire way to nail a drunk scene is to spin around until she's dizzy, but how much spinning is necessary depends on how drunk she's supposed to be in the scene. She explained. "It really depends on the level of drunkenness. In this scene, I did not spin around a ton. I think in the next scene, when you find us later and I'm at dinner and I'm really, really drunk, I was spinning around at that point."
Plaza's pirouetting is so simple a technique that it's kind of genius, but perhaps less surprising coming from someone who landed her breakout role by staring down the showrunner. As an actor, she has risen to great acclaim in recent years with projects including "Ingrid Goes West" and "Emily the Criminal," the former of which won best first feature at the 2018 Independent Spirit Awards while the latter ended up on former president Barack Obama's best-of-the-year list for 2022. But even the best actors often rely on remarkably basic techniques to deliver convincing performances.
While Plaza likely won't be back to reprise Harper Spiller for Season 3 of "The White Lotus," other fan favorites are slated to return for the next installment of Mike White's anxiety-inducing vacation saga. Meanwhile, Plaza is slated to join "Agatha: Coven of Chaos", an upcoming MCU series on Disney+.