The one thing you should never call Aubrey Plaza: “I don’t want to hear that word anymore”
Any actor whose breakout role involves them playing a particular type of character faces an uphill battle to shake off the shackles of typecasting, but Aubrey Plaza has been doing a stellar job of it.
She was hired as Parks and Recreation‘s April Ludgate after leaving an impression on casting director Allison Jones, who described her as “the weirdest, funniest girl I’ve ever met in my life,” while co-creator Michael Schur admitted that when he met her, she “came over to my office and made me feel really uncomfortable for like an hour.”
Just like that, she’d landed the part that would bring her the most mainstream awareness to date, and it set a precedent. Plaza’s droll, dry-witted take on April would inform several future projects in film and television, not that the star has allowed herself to be pigeonholed as a dead-eyed comedy performer.
While it’s true that the archetypal Plaza performance that was honed on Parks and Recreation has been repurposed in other productions, against-type outings in the TV series Legion, the jet-black comedy Ingrid Goes West, the psychological drama Black Bear, her Golden Globe-nominated turn in The White Lotus, and even Francis Ford Coppola’s batshit Megalopolis have shown added strings to her bow.
Still, when most people think of Plaza, there’s one word more than most that comes to mind to sum up her style. Unfortunately, she hates that word, and explained why: “Someone brought up the word ‘deadpan’, which for me is a word that I’m like, ‘Ugh, please, God, I don’t want to hear that word anymore,'” she told Time. “It has a weird, negative connotation for me.”
Unfortunately, it’s not inaccurate, at least as it applies to her more comedically inclined roles. It’s not necessarily wrong to call Plaza a deadpan actor when Parks and Recreation provides more than enough evidence to the contrary, but her issues with being labelled as such run much deeper, with the star calling it a disservice to not only her abilities, but her career trajectory.
“When I do something new, there’s always that one person who says, ‘There she goes, doing the Aubrey Plaza thing again,'” she said. “I want to go, like, ‘Fuck you, dude’. I can’t change the sound of my voice. I only have my own instrument to work with. I sound bitter, but I’m not.”
Plaza confessed that she’s “always surprised” when people use the word ‘deadpan’ to categorise her work, which she believes “feels a little reductive” to her accomplishments. Both can be true, though, with the Primetime Emmy nominee one of the best around when it comes to poker-faced comedy acting, but she’s also amassed plenty of credits that showcase her dramatic abilities.
Hollywood loves a buzzword, though, and ever since she introduced April Ludgate to the world, that’s the one that stuck. It’s been almost two decades since her screen debut at this point, so time remains on her side to build up a body of work that eventually casts the term she despises so much to the back of everybody’s mind.
