“I feel like there’s a part of me that could totally be a criminal,” Aubrey Plaza says. “I understand why that’s thrilling in a way. But, of course, I try not to do anything illegal.” She’s referring to her character in this summer’s John Patten Ford crime thriller Emily the Criminal, and she says all of this with her signature dry delivery.
As we chat over Zoom, Aubrey Plaza is eager to show me the gorgeous view of the Ionian Sea from her hotel room in Taormina, Sicily, where she’s filming the second season of White Lotus. She’s extremely busy of late: One week after the August 12 release of Emily the Criminal, she’ll also appear in the Alison Brie-led Spin Me Round, directed by Plaza’s husband, Jeff Baena. They married last year after more than a decade together.
In real life — as real as life can be over Zoom — the Parks and Recreation star is not quite as deadpan as she is on late-night television, though she does tend to speak matter-of-factly, in a tone that is halfway between joking and seriousness. The name that pops up inside her Zoom tile when Aubrey turns her camera off is “Evil Hag.” It’s also her Twitter handle.
She’s been enjoying her time in Italy.
Aubrey Plaza on the cover of MovieMaker Magazine, summer 2022.
“My Italian is getting better by the day. I don’t know what real life is anymore,” she jokes. Plaza is part of a rare subset of entertainers who broke into show business quickly and as a complete unknown. Shortly after graduating from New York University’s film school, she worked odd jobs and did improv in the Upright Citizen’s Brigade’s basement theater in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood.
Then, in one fateful week of auditions, she landed roles in the three projects that made her a star: Judd Apatow’s Funny People, Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and NBC’s long-running Parks and Recreation.
More than a decade has passed since her big break, and Plaza has a veteran’s assuredness in Emily the Criminal. She stars as a young woman who is down on her luck and deep in debt. Frustrated by a lack of good job opportunities, she seizes an opportunity to make money quickly by joining a credit-card scam ring run by a mysterious man named Youcef (Theo Rossi). But as Emily gets closer to Youcef, the consequences of her new life get more and more deadly.
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Plaza says working with Ford was refreshing because of his dedication to rehearsals.
“One of the things that impressed me so much about John Ford was when we were in pre-production and we were dealing with so much craziness, his number-one priority was rehearsals and meeting with the actors. So I just had an instant respect for him,” she says.
“Just kind of sitting down and rehearsing before we started shooting is actually way more rare in indie filmmaking than you would think — most times I work on things, there are no rehearsals. People just kind of get thrown in there.”
Emily the Criminal was shot “run-and-gun, down-and-dirty style,” Plaza says. “You bond over it because you just find yourself in these insane situations. We were shooting in Los Angeles, but we weren’t shooting in like the glamorous parts of Los Angeles. We were shooting in underground parking structures downtown, sketchy alleyways, some random open-air market,” she says.
“No one’s doing it for the money. You just feel like this is what filmmaking is really about. And that’s where I’m the happiest, when I’m in those kinds of situations. So I loved it.”
Aubrey Plaza has been called a method actor, but doesn’t use that term to describe herself.
“I will say that I’ve had the same acting coach on every single movie I’ve ever done, literally, besides one movie, which was the first film I was ever in called Mystery Team,” Plaza says. “I worked with Ivana Chubbuck on everything that I’ve done, and she has a method that I work with. And so I guess I work in the Ivana Chubbuck method, if you want to get really technical about it. But I will also say I’m not someone that adheres to strict rules in terms of my approach.”
Mystery Team came from Derrick Comedy, the internet sketch comedy group that also included future Atlanta mastermind Donald Glover. He was one of many soon-to-be stars who were at UCB at the same time as Plaza, including The Office’s Ellie Kemper, Sonic the Hedgehog’s Ben Schwartz, and Silicon Valley’s Zach Woods, who also stars in Spin Me Round. Chubbuck, who runs a Los Angeles drama school and wrote the bestselling book The Power of the Actor, has taught stars including Halle Berry and Charlize Theron.
Aubrey Plaza raises a glass in Emily the Criminal. Courtesy of Roadside Attractions / Vertical Entertainment
Rather than seeking full emotional identification with each part she plays, Plaza draws on her past.
“My approach is definitely immersive and personal and involves a lot of working through my own issues and my own life, my own childhood traumas, my own pain,” she says. “I find acting to be a really cathartic way to deal with it, and I know that’s not really how everybody does it, but for me, I spend so much time in my acting and on sets and working as an actor that I almost feel like it’s necessary for me to use the work, in a way, to help me work through my own stuff and to help me navigate my way through life.”
She says she commits equally to everything — “comedy, drama, whatever. I don’t take it lightly” — but wanted her role in Emily the Criminal to feel different from her other characters.
“She’s written to be someone that’s from New Jersey that is kind of a fish out of water in Los Angeles,” Plaza says. “It was an opportunity for me, so I worked with a dialect coach for the first time ever, and I found that to be really, really, really interesting and added another layer on top of what I’m already doing with this character. And I had a lot of fun doing that. … It’s really fun when you get a character that is just really not like you at all.”
Still, she found something very sympathetic at Emily’s core.
“I think there’s something about Emily where she has this criminalistic, unconscious desire. I don’t think that she ever wants to be a bad criminal or do anything bad, but I think there is a part of her that gravitates towards the thrill of it and likes it. And I definitely relate to that,” she says of her Emily the Criminal character.
“I remember how hard it was out of college, and how hard it was being from the East Coast and being in L.A. I totally relate to that, and although I feel very lucky that I didn’t have to freelance and work in the gig economy, or whatever you want to call it, for too long before I got an acting break, I got a taste of it. I remember working temp jobs and taking the subway to coffee shops to open up at five in the morning, grinding it out.”
Continue reading our cover story on Aubrey Plaza and Emily the Criminal…
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