Almost exactly 10 years ago, Aubrey Plaza was at one of her first real magazine photo shoots. Her memory is not great, she admits, so I help her cobble the scene together: It was a characteristically pleasant day in Santa Monica, at a hotel with a pool in the center of a small courtyard.
“Oh my god, right,” she says. “YES.” It was a Young Hollywood–themed shoot, with about a dozen actors assembled for pictures and speedy interviews. At this point in time, 24-year-old Aubrey had already filmed one of her first movie roles, as the stand-up comedian Daisy in Funny People, and her first regular TV gig, as the perpetually unimpressed intern April Ludgate on Parks and Recreation, but neither had been released.
She was pure potential energy that day—nobody knew who she was yet. Except for me, kind of, because I was supposed to be the one interviewing her. “I remember being really scared,” she says. “And insecure. All the other actors had people with them and I didn’t have anyone. I was alone, wandering around, like, ‘Is this where I’m supposed to be?’”
It was a disorienting time in Aubrey’s life overall. She had just moved to L.A. from Queens and had been temporarily living at a Days Inn on Hollywood Boulevard “with a bunch of Swedish tourists” and the comedian Lennon Parham. She was quite literally in the “faking it” part of “fake it till you make it”—in order to secure the role of a stand-up comic in Funny People, she pretended she already was one in her audition tape (in reality, she was doing improv, which may sound similar but is definitely a different skill set). Then when that worked, she figured she might as well commit to her con and started performing at comedy clubs around L.A.
As a sort of consolation, I tell her we had more in common at the time than we realized. I was just a little bit younger than her, still in college, and in some ways doing my own impersonation of a professional writer. “Whoa, really?” she says, pausing to consider this. “We’re old now,” she concludes, with the wistfulness of a person peering out a window into a foggy abyss. “We’ve seen too much.”
We all know what happened after Parks and Rec came out. The Amy Poehler–led series ran for seven seasons and made stars of nearly every lesser-known cast member—including Rashida Jones, Adam Scott, Aziz Ansari, Chris Pratt, and, of course, Aubrey Plaza. Aubrey’s April, who was written specifically for her, was darkly, thrillingly funny. The cult of her character also set an expectation for how fans and the media perceived her to be in real life, which she not only played into but amplified.
This resulted in some of the more genuinely entertaining red carpet, late-night, and awards-show appearances and magazine profiles of that era. She bullied Michael Cera at a premiere, frequently overwhelmed Conan O’Brien, and picked up a journalist’s recorder, when he stepped away, to secretly whisper “penis, vagin*” into the mic a bunch of times. And while these stunts were sometimes excruciating to witness (this was the point, of course), the Hollywood machine was more interesting for it. Aubrey seemed to have a visceral aversion to being boring. Or as boring people might put it: being normal.
So when I suggested that we do our Cosmo interview at a performance by the Bob Baker Marionette Theater company, I shouldn’t have been surprised that she immediately said yes. The fact that she’s currently promoting her new movie, Child’s Play, a reimagining of the classic 1988 possessed-doll horror film, might seem like a tidy connection, but it’s genuinely a coincidence—the idea was actually just that a vaguely creepy puppet show might be the exact kind of thing Aubrey Plaza would be down to do.
So on this also characteristically pleasant day in April 2019, Aubrey sits cross-legged on the green shag carpet in front of the stage at the Southern California Children’s Museum, leaning forward with two fists propping up her chin, not unlike the kids sitting in front of her. We watch a big fluffy bird perform before making our way over to a table stocked with craft supplies. Here, Aubrey begins to assemble a bunny with near-surgical precision. “In high school, I was involved in a lot of activities, Tracy Flick–style,” she says of her teen years in Wilmington, Delaware. She requests a pipe cleaner from the other end of the table, which a mom passes to a kid who then passes it to her. Aubrey tells me that while she made the most of the all-girls Catholic school where she was “popular but not necessarily cool,” she was also beginning to test out different ways of being a type-A overachiever—disruptive but funny at the same time. She and her friends would dress up in costumes and try to get a rise out of people at their local mall. “The funniest thing about it was that most people don’t react, they ignore,” she says. Long-term, Delaware was not for her. We finish our bunnies, and Aubrey frowns at her creation, which, despite being technically perfect, is apparently “just standard.” Then we leave the museum for lunch at a diner a few minutes away. We settle on two stools at the counter to order burgers with sides of salad for her and fries for me and begin to plot which slice of pie we’ll split later.
For someone so meticulous, Aubrey’s had pretty good luck with winging it when it comes to her career. Not that she looks down on other strategies: “Chris Pratt used to tell me when he would give me advice: ‘The separation is in the preparation.’” She laughs. “He’s one of those people who’s always very prepared. I was kind of the opposite. Clearly, it worked out for him.”
But there’s a lot more to Aubrey’s style than just not wanting to be, or seem, prepared—the realm of the unknown and the zero-gravity sensation of taking risks are where she truly thrives. “I’d say I have a pretty high tolerance for public humiliation,” she says, laughing again. “I kind of get off on it or something. It’s like this sick thing that makes me feel more alive and connected to the world.” This thread runs through her life, from her mall pranks to pretending to be a stand-up to the ways she’s toyed with the media. On bombing onstage, she says: “It’s exhilarating, because you just have to work through your ego in a way that you don’t get to do so often. You really have to take a moment with yourself to just get over it.”
Unadulterated success is the sort of thing that’s actually uncomfortable for her. And recently, the glitziness of the 10-year anniversary of Parks and Recreation in L.A. caught her by surprise. She didn’t realize where the reunion was being held until just before and had imagined it was going to be more of an intimate conversation. “When we walked in, it was like we were rock stars or something,” she says. “And it’s just so funny because when we were on the air, we were always being told that we were going to get canceled. Our ratings weren’t that good.”
The reunion was a bittersweet one. “It was kind of freaky. Like, it was really fun and we all love each other so much, but it’s just that feeling that you can never re-create something that was so perfect,” she says. “So it always feels like a little bit of a letdown or something. It was a very dreamlike experience. We were all kind of touching each other and looking at each other, but it was all so far gone from that thing.”
In the years since Parks’ series finale, Aubrey’s done films like the social media send-up Ingrid Goes West and the FX show Legion. She also starred in and coproduced the oddball indie The Little Hours, about rogue nuns, which her boyfriend, Jeff Baena, directed. More recently, she hosted the Independent Spirit Awards, which could have just been a standard gig but in her hands came alive. It unleashed a side of Aubrey that’s been building up for the past few years.
“My brain just exploded,” she says. “I went psycho style.” “As in, swinging for the fences?” I ask. “Oh, yeah. Constantly in arguments with the producers, being like, ‘I need more money! You need to send a car for Sharon Stone! Don’t f*ck me on this!’” She laughs. “I turned into a monster.” This is 2019 Aubrey: hyper-focused, intense, inspired. She grows more excited talking about it and draws closer. She slides a fry off my plate and takes a bite, then informs me that she’ll now be eating more of my fries. “Once I produced something and I realized how much of an impact I can have, I could never go back,” she says. “Now I’m, like, f*cked, because I’ve always gravitated toward more of a leadership position in whatever I’m doing. For Child’s Play, I wasn’t a producer, but I was acting like it—watching the monitor when other people were doing their scenes when I should have been in my trailer relaxing or something.”
I realize then that I’m seated next to the opposite of the detached, ironic Aubrey Plaza most people believe is the real one. This is something else entirely. I ask her if she feels like she’s had the chance to make Her Perfect Thing yet. “Not yet,” she says, “but soon.” I can feel the certainty in my gut because I too know what it’s like to arrive in your early 30s and suddenly realize that you not only know what you’re capable of doing—whether it’s entertainment for Aubrey, writing for me, or anything else—but how to do it.
“I’m entering a space right now where it’s like I’m so used to relying on this patriarchal idea of waiting around for someone to say, ‘You’—some brilliant man. I still have that voice inside my head that wants that,” she says. “But it’s like, I’m 34. I can do it myself. All the people who are my heroes created their own things. I’m ready to do that. I’m sick of doing other people’s sh*t. I want to do my own sh*t.”
Our pie arrives—Dutch apple with big scoops of ice cream, which we eat until we drop our spoons and pronounce ourselves completely ill. “I’ve seen too much,” she says again, this time her mock wistfulness replaced with something supercharged. “I know too much.”
She shakes her head. “I’ll just destroy you.” We both laugh and take a few more bites of pie. I don’t doubt her at all. “I’m getting there,” she says. “I think my 50s is when I’ll really hit my stride.”
Photographed by Peggy Sirota. Styled by Aya Kanai. Hair by David von Cannon at Starworks Artists using Oribe. Makeup by Kathy Jeung at Forward Artists using Dior. Manicure by Julie Kandalec at Bryan Bantry Agency. Props styled by Stockton Hall for Atelier Management.
On Aubrey: Lisa Marie Fernandez bathing suit and jacket, Messika Paris earrings (cover); Altuzarra dress, Lizzie Fortunato earrings, Nicki Roxx rings (pink flamingos); Versace dress, Calvin Klein Underwear bra, Ruslan Baginskiy cap, Christian Louboutin heels, Nicki Roxx earrings and rings, Small Flowers in Blanc designed by Andy Warhol x Flavor Paper wallpaper (white flowers); Temperley London dress, Versace ear cuff, Marla Aaron necklace, Elan Vital in Tropical designed by Ovando x Flavor Paper wallpaper (flowers); Fendi dress and bra, Bonnie Clyde sunglasses, Lele Sadoughi earrings, Nicki Roxx rings (ice cream); Christian Cowan top and skirt, Cosabella bra, Adeam earrings, Chloé sunglasses, Judith Leiber Couture “unicorn tears” clutch, Wild Thing in Wildly White designed by Ghislaine Viñas x Flavor Paper wallpaper (palms); REDValentino dress, Maison Bonnet belt, The Attico heels, Kendra Scott earrings, Fivestory bag (pink hearts).
