Cannes Cover Story: Aubrey Plaza Says Francis Coppola “Doesn’t Need My Defense”, Reveals The “Collaboration And Experimentation” Of ‘Megalopolis’
14.05.2024 - 07:23
/ deadline.com
When Aubrey Plaza first got the call about her role in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, she’d literally just stocked up on Godfather-themed keychains and lighters from an actual Godfather gift shop. It should be noted she was not obsessively combing eBay for insane fan memorabilia. In fact, there was a legitimate reason for her purchases: she just happened to be in Taormina, Sicily — the home of The Godfather, if you will — where it was partly shot. And of course there’s a gift shop.
Plaza was, at the time, taking her turn as the maritally-challenged Harper in the second season of the HBO hit series The White Lotus — a role for which she was individually Emmy and Golden Globe nominated. And, when she heard that Coppola wanted to get on Zoom with her, she was also staying in the San Domenico hotel, his old home-from-home during The Godfather shoot.
If all of that felt cosmically Coppola coincidental, Plaza also points out, “I’ve orbited this family a lot. I’ve been in a Roman Coppola movie, and I’ve been in four movies with [Coppola’s nephew] Jason Schwartzman.”
In Megalopolis, Plaza stars as Wow Platinum, an ambitious and Machiavellian journalist in the world of the mega-rich and influential. Set in a sort of near-future Manhattan-meets-New Rome, the story is based on the Catiline Conspiracy, a feud between a Roman senator and Cicero. Here, Cicero is represented by the city’s old-school mayor (Giancarlo Esposito) as he goes head-to-head with Adam Driver’s Caesar, an architectural idealist. After a disaster destroys the city, Caesar pushes for a rebuild with innovative, renewable materials, aiming for a utopia that will free the underclasses, while his enemy Cicero prefers to go with the traditional concrete,