Who is the most unnerving guest at the White Lotus luxury resort? Last year, the award went to Olivia, the Nietzsche-reading, boomer-loathing ice queen played by Sydney Sweeney. But this Halloween, she’s been dethroned by Aubrey Plaza’s Harper – a right-on employment lawyer with a deep disdain for Ted Lasso. She’s a stone-cold b**** and I can’t get enough of her.
From the second Harper’s pedicured toes touch down at the hotel’s Sicilian offshoot in The White Lotus season two, we know she will be trouble. Even Mount Etna begins to quake. And that’s never buono. While Harper’s holiday companions – her rich entrepreneur husband Ethan (Will Sharpe), insurance bro Cameron (Theo James) and his irrepressible wife Daphne (Meghann Fahy) – are all sunny smiles, she scowls behind designer sunglasses, turning down the welcome flute of prosecco because she’s been travelling on an empty stomach. And because, reader, she will not tolerate fun. “They wanna do a toast. Just hold it,” urges Ethan, through gritted, expensive teeth.
A few footsteps and forced smiles later, the couples are shown to their palatial suites. Hotel employee Rocco (Federico Ferrante) cheerfully explains that there’s a connecting door between their rooms. He offers to show the holidaying pals how it works. “No. It’s OK. I doubt we’ll use that,” Harper blurts out, her arms folded. Everyone dies a little inside.
Throughout the first episode, Harper treats us to a string of exquisitely painful clunks of social awkwardness. When Ethan starts to get comfortable in the suite, she admonishes him for choosing her side of the bed. She doesn’t want him to order the white fish at dinner. “Too fishy!” she protests. And while Cameron and Daphne have a tickle fight in their room, she bitches about having to spend time with a couple who “don’t read”.
Harper is, for sure, bad company. She is not “fun”. But, for some reason, around the time that she disses Ted Lasso, she starts to grow on me. When it comes to her clashes with alpha Cameron, it’s her side I’m taking. She tells him she works in employment law and deals with sexual harassment cases, and he suggests the majority of claims are bogus. If looks could kill.
Worse still is when she lends Cameron a pair of Ethan’s swimming trunks and he strips naked in front of her, his penis dangling as she awkwardly averts her gaze. And she’s suspicious of his intentions straight away, telling Ethan, “I just think you sold your company, got rich, and now he’s your best friend… At some point he is gonna approach you with some kind of money-making scheme. There’s a reason they invited us here. That’s my prediction. So we’ll see.” Harper also guesses that she and Ethan, who have Puerto Rican and Japanese heritage, respectively, have been invited along as Cameron and Daphne’s “white-passing diverse friends”.
As Harper and Ethan lie in bed next to each other, not an inch of them touching, my heart goes out to her. She tells Ethan about what happened when she and Cameron were in the room. About Cameron, who she’s just met, exposing himself. “Doesn’t seem that weird,” shrugs Ethan. Harper looks hurt, but because it’s TV and TV people have chronic communication failures, she simply sighs, plumps up her pillow and rolls over. I know which side of the connecting door – and the bed – I’d rather be on.
‘The White Lotus’ is exclusively available from 31 October on Sky Atlantic and streaming service Now
