Aubrey Plaza names the greatest acting performance ever: “That’s the obvious one”
Even though she’s best known for her work in comedy, and her persona is that of the weird friend everyone wants to hang out with, Aubrey Plaza is more attuned to ‘Golden Age’ Hollywood than its modern iteration.
Despite her most famous roles dripping in deadpan, like Parks and Recreation‘s April Ludgate, Emily the Criminal, Life After Beth, and Ingrid Goes West‘s title characters, Scott Pilgrim vs the World‘s Julie Powers, and her Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy-nominated turn as The White Lotus‘ Harper Spiller, she’s always been a cinephile.
While several of her best performances, whether in the off-kilter episodic comic book adaptation Legion and the dark psychological drama Black Bear, have showcased her underrated and often unsung dramatic chops, comedy is still the first genre most folks will think of whenever Plaza’s name comes up.
However, her personal tastes are much more eclectic. She’s a fan of Ingrid Bergman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Federico Fellini, Elaine May, and Pedro Almodóvar, but nothing comes close to her lifelong, unyielding, and undying admiration for John Cassavetes, one of the ‘New Hollywood’ era’s most transformative auteurs.
Naturally, it’s almost impossible to fall in love with Cassavetes’ work without going head over heels for his on and offscreen muse. As you’d expect, Plaza has been obsessed with Gena Rowlands for as long as she remembers, with the heavyweight pairing becoming the single biggest influence on her creative aspirations.
With that in mind, when Backstage pressed the star to pick one performance from cinema history that every actor needs to see in order to understand the best the profession has to offer, she didn’t hesitate. “Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence,” she replied. “That’s the obvious one for me, because she’s just so good. You can’t take your eyes off of her.”
Rowlands’ Golden Globe-winning and Oscar-nominated role as Mabel Longhetti has become a touchstone for multiple generations of would-be performers, with A Woman Under the Influence being mentioned by everyone from Josh Brolin and Austin Butler to Vanessa Kirby and Adria Arjona via Steve Buscemi and Winona Ryder as having had a transformative impact.
Cassavetes and Rowlands became the definitive pairing of each other’s careers, which comes with the territory when they were married and made ten pictures together, a shared filmography that changed the face of American cinema. That said, A Woman Under the Influence is inarguably the most influential, based entirely on how many actors and filmmakers have cited it as an inspiration.
As far as Plaza can see, those 146 electrifying minutes are enough to teach anyone anything they ever needed to know about acting. It’s a lofty pedestal to place any performance on, but looking at how many times it’s been brought up by so many different people, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to place Rowland’s work alongside Marlon Brando’s On the Waterfront, Jack Nicholson’s Chinatown, Robert De Niro’s Raging Bull, or any of the other usual suspects that come up whenever cinema’s most seminal showcases are mentioned.
