The exact moment Aubrey Plaza became Aubrey Plaza: “I can pinpoint it”
There’s cool, like throwing a balled-up bit of paper straight into a bin from miles away, or timing a traffic light so that you barely slow down and sail through as it turns green again while everyone else is sitting there, but then there’s Aubrey Plaza cool. Aubrey Plaza is on an effortless, different level of cool to pretty much everyone else.
If you’ve ever watched her on a chat show, you’ll know that she basically toys with the interviewer, always semi-serious, always insouciant, leaving the questioner floundering, not knowing if she’s joking, if she’s serious or if she’s about to jump up and punch them in the face. And she does all this while demonstrating a kind of feline indifference. She is incredibly cool.
And Plaza has been like that all the way back to the brilliant comedy series Parks and Recreation, when she gave off genuine ‘some people just want to watch the world burn’ vibes as April Ludgate, while also being the girl in the office that you desperately want to go for drinks with after work.
Since then, she’s spent over a decade doing some genuinely different and challenging movies, from comedies like the insane Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates in 2016, to independent thrillers like 2020’s acclaimed Black Bear.
She’s also done plenty more television, spending three seasons on the Marvel comics show Legion and season two of the HBO drama The White Lotus in 2022, for which she received an Emmy award nomination and a Golden Globe nomination to go with it.
Plaza, for all her knowing eye rolling and barely veiled cynicism, doesn’t believe she’s the person we all see on the big and small screens; however, she says she’s far less sarcastic in real life. She told AV Club: “I don’t think I’m really like that. I think I’m really good at playing that. That all really came from – I can pinpoint it. I think it came from this web series I did called The Jeannie Tate Show. That was the first time I really took that kind of attitude, personality, and put it into a project where people saw it.”
Although she got her initial part in Parks and Rec thanks to a TV exec who set up a meeting with the show’s creators, Greg Daniels and Michael Shur, she still had to convince them to completely rewrite the part they had in mind during her audition, and get them to create someone who didn’t care less about their job, something she did successfully.
Often seeming so offhand and bored, she added, “I think that helped me get a lot of parts. Once people see you do one thing and they like it, they want to see more of it, or they can’t look past it. And I don’t think I’m like that in real life. I just think I’m good at being like that. I don’t know why.”
Although she tragically lost her husband at the start of this year, she has battled ahead and most recently starred in the Disney+ show Agatha All Along with Kathryn Hahn, set in the MCU after the events of WandaVision. Aside from appearing in Ethan Coen’s chaotic movie Honey Don’t!, she’s also written a children’s book about witches, because these days we don’t have normal authors anymore, just celebrities who say stuff like “oh, I’d like to write a book” and then get instantly commissioned.
