The “really dirty” Aubrey Plaza audition that secured her a major role
Thanks to her turns in The White Lotus and Emily the Criminal, Aubrey Plaza has recently taken her career up a couple of notches. Leaving behind her early days of being pigeonholed as a solely comedic foil to other stars, she’s displayed her ability as a broad spectrum, encompassing many different emotions and styles. Take her role as the malevolent Shadow King in Marvel’s Legion, for instance. It’s far from April in Parks and Recreation or Julie in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
Whilst comedy remains in her craft, there’s now a refinement to Aubrey Plaza’s work that can only stand her in good stead for the future. Confirmed to feature in Francis Ford Coppola’s all-star passion project Megalopolis, this shows the kind of company she now keeps.
Despite Aubrey Plaza being a more serious actor than ever before, her oeuvre is brimming with comedic highlights that range from the deadpan to the outlandish. One movie that fits into the latter category is 2016’s Dirty Grandpa, an insane romp starring Robert De Niro, Zac Efron and Zoey Deutch. It follows a road trip with Efron’s corporate lawyer Jason Kelly and his paternal grandad, former Green Beret Dick, played by De Niro. Early in the film, the Kellys come across Jason’s old university classmate, Shadia, and her friends, Lenore and Bradley.
Plaza plays Lenore, and when the two groups first meet, Dick tells them he is a university professor. Lenore is immediately sexually interested in the much older Dick and makes some extremely lewd comments. They initially go their separate ways, but reconnect after Dick convinces Jason to meet the girls at Daytona Beach as he wants to have sex with Lenore. By the film’s end, the pair are married and have a child.
When appearing on Late Night with Seth Meyers in 2016 to promote Dirty Grandpa, Plaza surprised fans with a hilarious anecdote about the “really dirty” audition she gave to secure the role of Lenore. She revealed that she flashed her behind at the casting directors. It’s safe to say it filled in the requirements of the script.
Plaza told the host: “It’s just like, when will I get an opportunity to play De Niro’s love interest ever? So, I just was like, ‘I’m doing it’, and it was actually at Parks and Rec that I decided this. I left one of the last days of our shoot, and I had a plan to flash them – like my butt – and it was in the script, so it wasn’t like totally, you know, freaky on my part… but it was, and I even had the Parks and Rec makeup department put makeup on my – ‘Just make sure my butt looks good’.”
She concluded: “And then I just went there, and I just threw the script out and just sat, looked into the camera and said a bunch of really dirty things, then I flashed them, and then I left, and then I got it.”
See the interview below.
