Wait. Aubrey Plaza stalked her ex-boyfriend in Sweden?
In season 2 of The white lotus, Aubrey Plaza stars as Harper, the charmingly judgmental resort guest. But if her drunken scheming and mind games in Italy aren’t enough to convince you that we need more content that sends Plaza overseas, I urge you to read her recent interviews in GQ and that Los Angeles Times, out this week. In both, Plaza tells us that she worked on a script years ago with her friend, The white lotus creator Mike White, for a film about the time Plaza stalked her ex-boyfriend, a Swedish exchange student she dated for 20 years as a 16-year-old at her all-girls Catholic school in Delaware.
The prerequisite, Hon told the Times, is “a film that’s kind of based on an idea I pitched to Mike years ago about me going to Sweden to reconnect with my Swedish high school exchange boyfriend, who I hadn’t seen in ten years,” Plaza said. “Mike loved the idea of it, but then we started traveling in Scandinavia together and working on this idea. And then the idea developed and it almost became a kind of film about Mike and I traveling in Sweden together.”
On Monday, GQ revealed more details about the half-written script for this fantastic Scandinavian adventure film that we have been so cruelly denied until now. The story goes something like this: At 16, Plaza dated an extremely handsome Swedish exchange student, they “frolicked in cars” and the young Plaza “was broke when he got home.” Then, 10 years later, in the middle of a recording hiatus from Parks and Recreation, Plaza got the idea to write a script about stalking Mr. Extremely Handsome Swedish Exchange Student, which required her to actually try to track him down. When he didn’t respond to a Facebook message, she booked a flight to Sweden anyway and days later he responded to her message, said they were going to dinner and proceeded to bring his girlfriend. “It was a total disaster,” Plaza said GQ of the collection. “She was very suspicious of me. A lot happened that night.”
Then, in 2018, Plaza and White revived the idea and traveled to Gothenburg, Sweden together “so [White] could stalk Plaza while she was stalking her ex.” Neither Plaza nor White, who also spoke to GQ, shared too many details about the trip. But in 2020, White was in pre-production for the film in Finland — only for the pandemic to derail his plans and spur him to move on to development The white lotus. He deliberately wrote Plaza’s character for her in Season 2. So it seems Plaza’s increasingly iconic appearance on the Emmy-winning show is just a consolation prize in the absence of something even juicier.
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I just have so many questions about this movie. Would it be a quirky, offbeat comedy suited to Plaza’s signature deadpan and well-documented penchant for pranks and absurdity? Would she play a deeply obsessive wannabe like her character in Ingrid goes west? Would it be a spy movie or crime thriller similar to her last film Emily the criminal, about the desperate actions of a student debt-ridden young woman? And she could Parks and Rec co-star Adam Scott, please, please, somehow feature in it? Or maybe it turns out that Plaza’s ex has since become a cannibal-type, portrayed by none other than a blond, blue-eyed Timothée Chalamet??
As a deeply queer woman who has somehow managed to make being a deeply queer woman trendy and hip, Plaza is something of a hero to me. And meanwhile Midsummer convinced me several years ago to never venture out to Sweden, I would be willing to make the cinematic trek to the Plaza.