As the eldest of the grandkids on her Puerto Rican side, Plaza wound up assuming a lot of responsibility. “Nothing fazes me, I’m very malleable,” she says. “I grew up around a lot of people pulling me in different directions, but there was an overarching theme of family on both sides. Doesn’t matter who f*cked up or what’s going on. So many crazy things were always happening, but we all have each other’s back at all times. And you know where you came from.”
Romancing the Stone was one of Plaza’s favorite movies growing up, and the fact that Michael Douglas was both a star and a producer was a revelation. Who knew you could do both? By the mid-2000s, Plaza was an NYU student and Upright Citizens Brigade regular, filming sketches and uploading them to YouTube long before that was a viable career path. In one memorable clip, she spoofs the MTV speed-dating showNext, playing a horny teen who encourages her dates to humiliate themselves for her affection.
T-shirt by Eterne; belt (worn as necklace) and necklaces by Chanel. Throughout: hair products by Bumble and Bumble; makeup products by Chanel; nail enamel by Mother Nailture.Photograph by Dan Jackson; Styled by Katelyn Gray.
Which is to say, before she landed roles inParks and Recreation, Judd Apatow’sFunny People, andScott Pilgrim vs. the World— Edgar Wright’s beloved film adaptation of the graphic novel series—Plaza was out there grinding in the mean streets of New York comedy. “All I was doing when I was living in Queens at that time was just scheming,” she says. “I always wanted to do dramatic roles. Once I figured out, okay, I can do comedy, I’m funny, I was very calculated about my career. The people I admired most were people like Adam Sandler, who would do broad comedies and also go doPunch-Drunk Love.”
The UCB scene in Plaza’s days, she says, was all about making each other laugh. “When I’m producing, or doing anything, I feel like I adopt that mentality again—forget about all the noise of success. How can I impress the people that I think are the funniest people? That’s what it was all about. Getting to perform for people that you respect and blowing their minds.”
She may live in California now, but Plaza’s look is New York–forward—black wool overcoat, Chelsea boots, an Adidas ball cap. She’s been in the Atlanta area for two projects filmed in the same studio: Coppola’sMegalopolis and Marvel’sAgatha: Coven of Chaos, aWandaVision spin-off. For two weeks, her shoot days actually overlapped. “I started doing double duty,” she tells me. “Literally, like, throw on the wig in one trailer, do whatever I’m doing in the Marvel thing—I’m contractually not allowed to say—and then go to the other trailer, have my blond platinum hair, do whatever I’m doing inthat movie.” Coppola was hooked from day one. “After her Zoom audition, I couldn’t stop thinking about her,” he says. “I was fascinated and found myself laughing and wanting more. Aubrey brought herself to the character—I couldn’t separate them. She draws you in, fills you with desire and laughter. She truly has this ‘wow’ factor.”
Plaza has never relied solely on charisma. Her acting is unshowy and unpretentious, and she can alter a scene with the shift of an eyebrow. You want to see her in a remake of a film likeAfter Hours, skulking around ’80s SoHo and doing weird sh*t. As it happens, Plaza’s been taking on increasingly ambitious projects. In 2017’s dark comedyIngrid Goes West, on which Plaza was a producer, she plays a woman with an apparent mental illness who stalks an Instagram influencer played by Elizabeth Olsen. A giddy Plaza later surprised Olsen on the red carpet by showing up in the exact same Marc Jacobs outfit and pretending—“I don’t know how this happened”—that it was an accident. “There’s a potential chaos that she brings to a set that I strive to have more of in my own work,” says Olsen, now a close friend. “That was really fun—to kind of teeter on the edge with her. There’s a sense of freedom to it, where she could surprise herself even.” Olsen circles back to clarify something, and I sense their whole friendship between the lines: “To me, it’s chaos, because I’m a control freak, but it’s a sense of freedom.”
Last year—in the thrillerEmily the Criminal, on which she was also a producer—Plaza went deeper still as a woman who joins a credit-card-scam underworld to pay off her massive student debt. Plaza chose the role because of the unexpected turns in John Patton Ford’s script, as well as its devotion to character development. “It felt kind of old-school,” Plaza says. “It felt like amovie, like the kind I grew up watching.” Now, on top of theWandaVision spin-off, she’s working on what she calls “a big undertaking”—a script she wants to direct, which must be a romantic comedy given the titan she invokes: “I’m going in to, like, do some Garry Marshall sh*t.”
“I think people are really starting to see truly how versatile and talented Aubrey is,” says Haley Lu Richardson, who played Portia on the second season ofThe White Lotus. “Not just with comedy but with the depths that she can go to. She’s having a moment for sure, and she deserves it. She works really hard and she cares a lot.” Like others who know Plaza well, Richardson can’t help but add a loving zinger: “And she’s nuts.”
She can summon some delicious anarchy for the camera. “I’m way more socially, like, anxious and introverted than people would expect, I think,” she tells me over coffee. “I’m just as insecure as anybody, and I’m probably way more shy than people think. But obviously the way I deal with that is, like, extreme behaviors.” Her guiding philosophy comes down to this, she adds: “I try to maintain some authenticity, for better or for worse. That’s the goal. If all else fails, at least be authentic.”
Plaza rarely reads her own press, but someone forwarded her an LATimes piece about her bit at the SAG Awards. The story, by Suzy Exposito, was entitled “In Praise of Jenna Ortega, Aubrey Plaza and Moody, Deadpan Latinas.” Plaza beams when I mention it. “I loved that,” she says. “That sh*t is important to me, because that’s my whole thing. Even with April Ludgate, it was like, Come on. Sofia Vergara is not the only Latina personality. There’s other ones! A lot of the characters I play, even withWhite Lotus—it’s important to normalize that there’s all kinds of different Latina people. I mean, all my Puerto Rican cousins are, like, morbid. Morbid sh*t is going on over there!”
As Plaza and I commiserate about all the ways that Latinas can and do exist, her multiplicity comes into focus: her bicultural upbringing, her public and private selves, her ability to play taut characters like Emily the criminal and Harper the lawyer, snarling perverts like Lenny on the underappreciated sci-fi dramaLegion, and more. What Plaza has done, and will do again, is let all these impulses coalesce.
“She is a warm and snuggly person with people she trusts,” says Amy Poehler. “Kids love her because she doesn’t talk down to them and she isn’t afraid to be weird. She cares deeply and works really hard. She has a good sense of humor about herself. But don’t be fooled, she is a witch.”
This story has been updated.
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