“It was a really bad idea”: Aubrey Plaza’s calamitous 2010 attempt at going “full method”
Method acting continues to be one of the industry’s most polarising practices, and it definitely isn’t for everyone, as Aubrey Plaza found out when she made a calamitous attempt at trying to immerse herself in character before auditioning for a major role.
No offence to her, but she doesn’t look like a method actor, nor has she played any character in any film or television project that would require her to do it, either. If anything, Plaza’s success has come through being herself, although she’s at pains to point out that she’s not as weird as you might think.
Then again, she creeped her way into landing her breakthrough role in Parks and Recreation, and the overall consensus from her time interning at Saturday Night Live was that she was at least a little eccentric, so from the sound of it, the truth probably lies somewhere squarely in the middle.
As she’s shown in pictures like Black Bear and Ingrid Goes West, she’s more than just a deadpan comic foil, too. There’s a genuinely gifted dramatist under the thousand-yard stare, but when she threw her hat into the ring for a blatantly commercial enterprise in 2010, the star took things several steps too far.
“One of the earlier auditions I had was for Wes Craven, for, like, the Scream remake or something,” Plaza recalled. “They told me, ‘You’re going in to audition to play a character that you eventually find out is the killer’, or whatever. So, I took that really literally, and I was thinking, ‘Alright, I’m gonna dress like the killer.'”
Based on how Scream 4 turned out, that would have been the part of Sidney Prescott’s cousin, Jill Roberts, who was played by Emma Roberts, since the film’s other Ghostface is Rory Culkin’s Charlie Walker, and as good as Plaza is, she wasn’t reading for a role set to be played by a male actor.
“I was really frumpy because I thought, ‘I’m a murderer’, and then everybody else was glamorous and they all looked great, and I just looked insane,” she continued. “And they were like, ‘The whole point is that we’re not supposed to know that you were the killer. You pretty much just look like a murderer right away.'”
If she couldn’t maintain the façade for her audition, then the filmmakers were convinced that she wouldn’t be able to keep up the pretence until the typical third-act reveal in every Scream flick, where at least one of the main characters is eventually revealed to have been running around Woodsboro, stabbing the shit out of everyone. Funnily enough, Plaza agreed: “I blew that one,” she concurred.
Some people simply aren’t cut out for emulating the Marlon Brandos and Daniel-Day Lewises of the world, and Plaza realised pretty quickly that she wasn’t one of them: “I went full method and it was a bad, really bad idea.” It sounds like it, and it’s no wonder she didn’t get the part.
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