Aubrey Plaza

• 1. Introduction

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  Aubrey Plaza once ran onto the stage of the MTV Movie Awards and grabbed Will Ferrell's award for Comedic Genius. The year was 2013. She held a drink in one hand. The title of her new film, The To Do List, was written across her chest. The stunt borrowed its idea from Kanye West's interruption of Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. Security threw her off the studio lot where the ceremony was held. It was a piece of improvised promotion, and it was also a fair preview of her career. Plaza is an American actress, comedian and producer who treats the rules of a room as a prompt for something stranger. She is best known for playing people who cannot be bothered, yet the work behind that deadpan is anything but careless. How did a shy girl from Delaware end up crashing a Hollywood stage? Why do directors keep handing her characters that do not fit the page? And what changes when the performer behind the shrug decides to produce, write and direct?

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• 2. A Delaware Childhood

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  Aubrey Christina Plaza was born on the 26th of June 1984, in Wilmington, Delaware. She was the eldest of three sisters. Her parents, Bernadette and David, were 19 and 20 when she arrived. Both held a string of jobs and went to night school. Her mother went on to become an attorney, and her father became a financial advisor. Plaza has named their work ethic as a lasting influence.

  Her father's side of the family is Puerto Rican. Her grandfather was born in Arecibo and moved to the mainland at 17. She also counts some Taíno and Basque heritage. Her mother was adopted and is of Irish descent, and her maternal grandparents came from Ireland. While her parents worked, her Irish grandparents and her Puerto Rican relatives raised her.

  As a child she loved movies and spent hours in imaginative play. She has described herself as shy and quiet until middle school, when she discovered community theater. Her upbringing was, in her words, "very Catholic", and she attended Ursuline Academy, an all-girls Catholic school. There she served as student-council president and acted with the Wilmington Drama League and the Delaware Theatre Company. She also made short films as a hobby. At sixteen, she represented her school at a Delaware youth leadership conference held by Joe Biden.

  Her real film education came from a video store, where her aunt gave her a teenage job. Browsing the shelves, she found independent cinema and filmmakers such as John Waters and Christopher Guest. Waters' satire Serial Mom, released in 1994, left a deep mark on her. She felt a kinship with his comic sensibility. She also enrolled at an improv school in Philadelphia. In 2001 she attended the New York Film Academy's summer camp for filmmaking.

  She graduated from Ursuline Academy in 2002 and moved to New York. At New York University's Tisch School of the Arts she studied film and television production, finishing in 2006. Two years after her arrival in the city, she began performing in a theatre that sat literally underground.

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• 3. Underground Theatre

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  Plaza called her time at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre "intoxicating". She began training and performing improv and sketch comedy there in 2004. She also took stages at the Laugh Factory and The Improv. Amy Poehler was the performer she credited for inspiring her to try improv at all.

  While still in film school, she interned at Saturday Night Live for the 2004-2005 season. Afterward she became an NBC page. That job sat a rung below her SNL internship, but the page program at 30 Rockefeller Plaza is legendary and highly selective. The apprenticeship paid off in 2006, when she appeared in an episode of 30 Rock. That same year she also acted in two short films, Killswitch and In Love.

  Her stunts from this period had a prankster's logic. In 2008 she joined an Improv Everywhere sketch in which participants carried a full desktop computer and monitor into a Starbucks in New York City. She also built up small credits online and on television. She had a recurring part in Maggie Carey's web series The Jeannie Tate Show. She played Robin Gibney in ESPN's Mayne Street in 2008. She also appeared in the first episode of "Terrible Decisions with Ben Schwartz" on Funny or Die.

  None of it was a breakthrough, but all of it was practice. The performer who had inspired her to try improv would soon become her on-screen boss.

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• 4. The Pitch

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  Plaza had never done standup when she won a role as a standup comic. The part was in Funny People, a black comedy-drama directed by Judd Apatow, where she played Seth Rogen's love interest. It came right after her feature film debut in Mystery Team, made by the group Derrick Comedy, in 2009.

  To prepare, she signed up for open mic nights at comedy clubs and bars around New York City. For her audition tape, she performed five minutes of standup and recorded it at a show hosted by her friend Donald Glover.

  The trip to Los Angeles for Funny People changed her career for a second reason. The film's casting director, Allison Jones, asked if she wanted to take other meetings while in town. Jones arranged one with Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, who were developing Parks and Recreation. They described the pilot to her. They were weighing an assistant for Amy Poehler's character, imagined as a doltish blonde.

  Plaza offered a different idea on the spot. Her character would be a smart intern who was at the department only for college credit and did not care about the job. She thought that indifference would make a funny contrast with Poehler's character. Daniels and Schur liked it and created April Ludgate. Plaza has said she is more like Poehler's earnestly hard-working character in real life. For April's apathy, she drew on her younger sister.

  She played April from 2009 to 2015. Her performance drew praise, and April was seen as one of the show's breakout characters. Jones, meanwhile, had one more recommendation to make for Plaza's Los Angeles trip.

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• 5. Between Seasons

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  Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was the audition Allison Jones suggested. Plaza was cast as the supporting character Julie Powers, and the film arrived in 2010. On the 12th of March 2010, she also performed at A Night of 140 Tweets, a celebrity tweetathon for Haiti held at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles.

  The breaks between Parks and Recreation seasons became her laboratory. She appeared in a CollegeHumor short alongside Jason Bateman and Will Arnett. In 2011 she had a recurring role in the sketch series Portlandia. She also played "The Princess" in the sci-fi web series Troopers, and she appeared in the films Damsels in Distress and 10 Years.

  In 2012 came her first starring role in a major film, Safety Not Guaranteed. She played a magazine intern who answers an odd want ad. Reviews were positive, and she won the Breakthrough Performance (Female) award at the 2012 Young Hollywood Awards.

  The following years scattered her across genres. She played Sacagawea in a Drunk History segment about Lewis and Clark. She voiced Eska in The Legend of Korra, and in 2014 she voiced Grumpy Cat in a television film for the Lifetime Network. That year she also starred in Life After Beth, a horror comedy about a young woman who returns from the dead, written and directed by Jeff Baena. She appeared as well in Hal Hartley's drama Ned Rifle.

  In 2016 she played the rebellious Tatiana in Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, opposite Zac Efron, Anna Kendrick and Adam DeVine. Critics praised her. She turned up as a gnome called "Hawaiian Coffee" on HarmonQuest, and as Aaron Burr in Drunk History's "Hamilton" episode. She guest voiced on SpongeBob SquarePants alongside Betty White in the episode "Mall Girl Pearl". She also played a contract killer named Cat Adams on Criminal Minds, first in season 11, then in seasons 12 and 15. In Dirty Grandpa she played Lenore, with Zoey Deutch, Zac Efron and Robert De Niro.

  The next phase of her career would swap sitcom shrugs for a superhero villain.

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• 6. The Producer's Chair

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  Two films that Plaza both produced and starred in premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017. The Little Hours is a black comedy about medieval nuns, loosely drawn from stories in The Decameron. In Ingrid Goes West, she played a fan obsessed with social media who fixates on an influencer, played by Elizabeth Olsen.

  Variety critic Peter Debruge singled out her work. He wrote: "Nobody plays ambivalence better, and yet, Plaza allows herself to seem vulnerable here." Ingrid Goes West won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature. In 2018 she starred in the indie comedy An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn.

  From 2017 to 2019, she also played two roles in the FX series Legion: Amahl Farouk, the Shadow King, and Lenny Busker. Critics praised both the series and her performance. Lenny had been written for a middle-aged man. When she was offered the part, she asked that the dialogue and actions stay as written, because she did not want the character "being tied down to anything gender-wise". David Bowie shaped her approach. The creators gave her freedom, and she worked with directors and choreographers on sequences the script described only vaguely.

  She hosted the Independent Spirit Awards in 2019 and again in 2020. In 2019 she played the mother of a boy named Andy, who brings home a killer doll named Chucky, in the Child's Play reboot of the 1988 film. In 2020 she played Riley Johnson in the romantic comedy Happiest Season. She also produced and starred in Black Bear, an experimental thriller about a filmmaker who retreats to a mountain cabin seeking inspiration. NME said it examined the power dynamics in filmmaking. Collider saw an exploration of human relationships, gender dynamics and celebrity.

  In 2021 she wrote and directed for the first time, on the episode "Quiet Illness" of the Showtime anthology Cinema Toast. The series was created by her partner, Jeff Baena, and rebuilds public domain films into new stories. Inspired by the actress Loretta Young, Plaza edited clips of Young's work into a psychological thriller about a woman's self-esteem. She cast Christina Ricci as a voice narrator. She called the result "trippy", with a "pandemic-filming style". That year she also co-wrote a children's book with Dan Murphy, The Legend of the Christmas Witch, illustrated by Julia Iredale.

  Then came Emily the Criminal in 2022. Plaza produced it and played the title role, a woman buried in student debt who is drawn into crime. The New York Times called her work "wonderfully nuanced". Little White Lies wrote that it was "perhaps Plaza's best performance to date". The Chicago Sun-Times praised "richly layered work". At the 2023 Independent Spirit Awards, she earned a Best Lead Performance nomination for acting, plus a Best First Feature nomination as producer.

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• 7. Range and Recognition

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  Harper, a lawyer vacationing in Sicily with her husband, brought Plaza her biggest awards attention. She played the part in the second season of HBO's The White Lotus. The role earned her an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series. It also brought a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

  Her 2022 was crowded. Her film Spin Me Round premiered at South by Southwest. In February she contributed original poetry to Eating Salad Drunk, a poetry anthology by comedians that raised money for Comedy Gives Back, a nonprofit helping comedians in financial hardship. The adult animated sitcom Little Demon premiered on FXX on the 25th of August 2022, with Plaza as both voice actor and executive producer, joined by Danny DeVito and Lucy DeVito. In October, the Newport Beach Film Festival gave her its Artist of Distinction Award.

  In January 2023 she hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time. That May she drew criticism for a parody ad called "Wood Milk", which mocked plant-based milks in favor of dairy. In July, it was announced that she would make her stage debut in an off-Broadway revival of John Patrick Shanley's Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. Her co-star was Christopher Abbott, and the play follows two strangers who become lovers after meeting at a dive bar. She earned a Drama League Distinguished Performance nomination. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world that year. She has also been the spokesperson for Cointreau's "MargaRight" campaign since 2023.

  In 2024, she and Nick Offerman reunited in a Mountain Dew ad during the Super Bowl LVIII broadcast. She was confirmed for Liarmouth, John Waters' first film in over 20 years, based on his own novel. The director whose work had grabbed her in a video store was now casting her. That year she also played the future self of Elliott Labrant in My Old Ass and TV presenter Wow Platinum in Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis. On the 18th of September 2024, Disney+ premiered Agatha All Along, a miniseries set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in which she played Rio Vidal, who is also Death.

  In August 2025, it was announced that she would produce and star in The Heidi Fleiss Story, a biopic in which she will play the former Hollywood madam.

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• 8. Life Off Screen

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  Plaza was 19 when she started dating Joe Wengert. She has said she is bisexual. Her next well-known relationship began when she and the actor Michael Cera were both cast in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. It lasted 18 months. At one point, driving through Las Vegas, the two nearly married as a joke. Cera has said the plan was to divorce right away, so they could call each other "my ex-husband" and "my ex-wife" in their twenties.

  She met the writer and director Jeff Baena at a game night in 2011. They became a couple and frequent collaborators, and she starred in four of his films. He proposed at a site tied to the Basque witch trials in Zugarramurdi. In 2021, they decided to marry on their tenth anniversary and held a small ceremony in their backyard, wearing tie-dye shirts. They quietly separated in September 2024 after marital difficulties. Plaza moved to New York but stayed in frequent contact with him.

  On the 3rd of January 2025, Baena was found dead at the home the couple had shared, where he had continued to live. The cause of death was suicide. Plaza withdrew from presenting at the 82nd Golden Globe Awards, held two days later. On the 16th of February, she hosted part of the Saturday Night Live 50th Anniversary Special and paid tribute to him by wearing a tie-dye shirt like the ones from their wedding.

  Her health has also shaped her story. At 20 she had a stroke, which caused temporary paralysis and temporary expressive aphasia. Several years later she had a transient ischemic attack while on the set of Parks and Recreation. She has spoken about living with social anxiety.

  On the court, she is a recreational basketball player. The sport has cost her two torn ACLs. The first came in a recreational league game in the mid-2010s. The second came in 2024 during a game of knockout ahead of the WNBA All-Star Game.

  On the 7th of April 2026, People announced that Plaza was expecting her first child. The magazine named her partner as Christopher Abbott, the actor with whom she had shared both a mountain-cabin thriller and a dive-bar stage play.

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