“Obviously, Aubrey plays deadpan, she plays to the humorous aspects of her dark side,” says White. “But the more you know her, you realize she’s very big-hearted and, in a way, insecure. The classic somebody who is projecting strength, but the vulnerability is so palpably there. I just felt like it would be fun to capture some of that, something that I haven’t seen her do.”
Plaza tried to escape the deadpan niche years ago. In 2016, she experimented with broad, raunchy comedies, costarring in two Zac Efron vehicles, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates and Dirty Grandpa. In the latter, she invited Robert de Niro to do a panoply of obscene things with her before concluding the film by asking “Are you cumming or dying?” Plaza fought hard for both parts, proving that she could be the wild busty blonde the script called for despite being neither busty nor blonde. “That was a time when I was consciously trying to get out of the April Ludgate zone,” she says.
But as big, original comedies dried up, she returned to more idiosyncratic projects, in particular 2017’s Ingrid Goes West. Rather than dialing into Plaza’s too-cool-for-everything wavelength, Ingrid wasn’t cool enough for anything. As a social media stalker desperate for an Instagrammable life, Plaza’s outsider attitude felt once again new. A few years later, she downright charmed audiences in 2020’s Happiest Season, the first holiday rom-com to center a lesbian couple. Plaza played Riley, a supporting character whose chemistry with Kristen Stewart was so electric that many viewers wished she was the love interest, preferring her to the closeted romantic lead played by Mackenzie Davis. The movie ended up being a showcase for Plaza’s empathic, down-to-earth side. “In my head, I play normal people all the time,” she says, “but other people don’t think so, because I’m not necessarily your average Jane.”
With Ingrid, Plaza leveled up, becoming a producer, although her company, Evil Hag Productions, which formed in 2016, didn’t officially put its logo on a feature film until last summer’s critically lauded thriller Emily the Criminal. (“I don’t know how companies work, or when they become real,” she says.) Emily is a struggling caterer who resorts to credit card fraud to pay off her student loans before being drawn to riskier, more lucrative gigs. Plaza was handed the script from a friend of John Patton Ford, who wrote and directed, and she imagined it as a sort-of companion to Good Time, the tense, gritty Safdie brothers’ film starring Robert Pattinson.
But instead of the $5 million budget she wanted, they made it for $2 million, which is next to nothing when shooting in L.A. Every day required a creative solution. At one point, they were filming at a bus stop in Hollywood at 3 a.m., only nobody was entirely sure whether they had permission to do so. Inspired, Ford asked Plaza to board an approaching bus. “No actor would ever do that, but Aubrey was like, ‘You got it,’” he recalls. (Like White said, sometimes you want her on the bus.) So they rode around filming until they reached Echo Park. This time, there was no room in the schedule for mischief. “She’s a great scene partner,” says Ford. “She helps the other actors be spontaneous. She looks at you and you’re so convinced she’s going to poke a voodoo doll. Magic happens.” Emily the Criminal was released on demand the day before we met. Plaza pulls out her phone to show me a screenshot of the Apple TV homepage, where the film ranked third behind box-office blockbusters Bullet Train and Top Gun: Maverick. “It’s the little movie that could,” she says.
Phoebe Reilly
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