Aubrey Plaza In A Cop Uniform And Margaret Qualley In A Pencil Skirt—The ‘Honey Don’t’ Trailer Is Gay Christmas In May
Focus Features just dropped the new trailer for their upcoming film starring Aubrey Plaza and Margaret Qualley, Honey Don’t, and boy are we obsessed with the new avatars they are stepping into. The film will be the second installment in Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s “lesbian B-movie trilogy” following 2024’s Drive Away Dolls (also starring Qualley), marking twenty years of writing together for the husband-wife duo.
Opening with a hilarious interaction between our two favorite actresses, where Plaza’s officer MJ tells Qualley’s detective Honey she loves her “click-clacking heels”, we realize this may be a reversal from the vampy, darkly sarcastic, femme fatale roles we typically imagine Plaza in.
It’s Qualley who is rocking the power suits and pencil skirts, coming in hot with the one-liners, and giving off massive confidence, even when faced with pretty-boy criminal cult leader played by Chris Evans. Plaza’s police officer MJ comes off a little shy in comparison. Her wardrobe is much less varied and significantly more masculine. We see her in uniform, a t-shirt, a wife-beater, but would still happily let her write us a traffic ticket.
Temporally, the trailer feels immediately ambiguous. At times strong visual queues like Qualley’s sun dresses at a crime scene, a dated patterned bedspread, or a transistor radio suggest we’re somewhere in the 90s, following in the footsteps of Drive Away Dolls, but incongruous technology like a modern conference phone suggests we might be in a retro-leaning version of the present day.
The setting in Bakersfield may provide some explanation, while it’s not quite a small town, it does bisect the rural and agricultural stretch of California between L.A. and Fresno. However much this may be a commentary on how time feels like it stops in parts of America, how trends like Qualley’s pleated slacks have a way of coming full circle, or how modern stories with retro-aesthetics are becoming a wider trend (see Sex Education‘s John Hughes inspired visuals), it seems we’ll have to wait until the film’s debut to reach a final verdict.
Until then, check out the full trailer for yourself below!