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Aubrey Plaza says of her co-star Adam Devine: ‘I feel like we might have had crazy, similar white-trash upbringings, surrounded by party animals.’
Aubrey Plaza says of her co-star Adam Devine: ‘I feel like we might have had crazy, similar white-trash upbringings, surrounded by party animals.’ Photograph: Vera Anderson/WireImage
Aubrey Plaza says of her co-star Adam Devine: ‘I feel like we might have had crazy, similar white-trash upbringings, surrounded by party animals.’ Photograph: Vera Anderson/WireImage

Aubrey Plaza: ‘Things take on a different meaning when death comes so close’

This article is more than 7 years old

The actor best known as Parks and Recreation’s April Ludgate talks about her new film, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates – and the stroke she suffered aged 20

How are you today?” asks Aubrey Plaza as I’m ushered in to meet her. She’s behind a round hotel-room dinner table. She does not rise. We don’t shake hands.

“Um, great. And ... uh, terrified. A little.”

“Terrified? Why?” She’s smiling like a cat with a mouse.

OK, I’m not really terrified. I’m just nervous that this experience may go off the rails, perhaps because of the interview I read with Parks and Recreation creator Greg Daniels, who hired her after what he described as “an extremely uncomfortable hour with Aubrey Plaza”. And she needed to impress him, which certainly isn’t necessary with me.

Later she tells me she’s used to this, that her role as the aggressively deadpan April Ludgate on Parks and Recreation, which was expressly sculpted out of aspects of her own personality, tends to creep into people’s perceptions of her in real life.

“You know, once people see you do a character like that, and if they haven’t seen you in anything else, they tend to think that’s who you are and that’s all you can do. But the more I played that character, I realised: ‘Oh wow, people really think I’m just like this all the time.’ It’s strange, but I have actually found it useful in getting other work. I thought: ‘Anything I do differently from this is always going to surprise them.’ And it’s starting to work.”

Aubrey Plaza and Amy Poehler in Parks and Recreation. Photograph: Colleen Hayes/NBC

It is. Her new movie, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, showcases a high-stepping, louder-than-bombs, coarse-mouthed, hard-partying, bad Aubrey, alongside Anna Kendrick. Previous roles, mainly in low-budget indie comedies, have given us a buttoned-down, sceptical, hard-to-reach Plaza and light variations on – to quote that internet meme about her character – “Fuck Yeah April Ludgate”. Here, she blasts off in another direction entirely.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is loosely based on a real story of two pain-in-the-arse brothers with a history of ruining family gatherings, whose parents order them to hustle up some proper young ladies to squire to their sister’s wedding in Hawaii. They finally find them on the net – through Craigslist. The boys are played by Zac Efron and Adam Devine, the latter in his first big movie role, and there is a certain four-way charisma to the group that gives the movie its energy.

But Plaza is the pleasant surprise. Much of what we already know of her – the deadpan, the detectable inner wildness, the silent-movie-actress eyes that she has weaponised so effectively for comic purposes – is all there. But, for the first time, Plaza is burning on all cylinders: sexual, cynical, robustly crude and amoral. This movie, as she says, giggling softly, “is so rude”.

Photograph: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock

She’s an excellent swearer, I tell her. Where did that come from?

“I don’t know ...” She gives a little chortle. “I guess whatever my character has to say, I have to say. I mean, what are words anyway? They’re just words: ‘chair’, ‘lawn’, ‘fuck’!” She titters to herself as if she just swore in church.

Plaza is at a turning point in her 10-year career. In addition to appearing top of the bill on Mike and Dave, she has recently taken more serious parts, including a knockout two-handed episode of Criminal Minds, in which she played a murderer, and a juicy top role in Legion, a Marvel-spin-off drama created for FX by Fargo’s Noah Hawley. She was also Robert De Niro’s inappropriately youthful love interest in the uproariously filthy Dirty Grandpa, also with Efron. The roles and pay cheques are growing, and she likes that.

Plaza and Kendrick already knew each other from Scott Pilgrim vs the World in 2010, but she had not previously met Devine, the co-creator and co-star of Comedy Central’s Workaholics. It turned out they had experiences in common. “He reminds me of someone I grew up with. I feel like we might have had crazy, similar white-trash upbringings, surrounded by party animals, so we have a similar kind of sensibility.

“We both had really major health crises,” she says in a wonderfully inappropriate, upbeat tone. At 20, Plaza had a stroke that robbed her of the power of speech, and, aged 11, Devine was hit by a cement truck, causing multiple fractures and forcing him to learn to walk again.

“I’m pretty sure that has a lot to do with his approach to life, and with me it’s the same thing,” she says. “Things take on a different meaning when death comes so close. I was older but he was still growing, and his thing was much more directly physical.

“I had expressive aphasia, where I could understand what’s happening, but I couldn’t talk or communicate. Like, you could say something and I would know what you meant but I couldn’t express it or even write it. That was the weirdest part. When they gave me a piece of paper and a pen I just kept writing lines instead of words. But at least I could walk. When it first happened to me I was paralysed, but I was so young that my brain healed itself really fast. I was really lucky in that way.”

Aubrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick in Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. Photograph: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock

She was at New York University at the time, and after her recovery she started interning at Saturday Night Live. I’m more interested in her next internship, as a page in NBC’s legendary apprenticeship programme. The list of alumni is long and extremely rich in household names of the past half-century: Disney CEO Michael Eisner, Eva Marie Saint, Bruce Willis, a ton of anchormen and chatshow hosts, and Joan Rivers. It is said, famously, that it’s harder to become an NBC page than it is to get into Harvard.

“Joan Rivers was a page? That’s amazing – I had no idea!” Plaza says, in an unusual display of animation and admiration.

“It’s actually rare – going from an intern to a page, which is the lowest of the low. I mean, you’re wearing those uniforms and giving studio tours. I had a few contacts inside the 30 Rockefeller building who put in a good word for me, and I was very laser-focused. But you have no idea how you’re doing or what they want from you. We all had to give a presentation about who we are andwhy we deserve to have this job. I remember that I cursed – by accident– and then I thought, I’m never gonna get this! But I prevailed, I guess.”

Plaza later did improv with the now-legendary comedy forcing house Upright Citizens Brigade (co-founded by Parks and Recreation’s Amy Poehler) and some standup, before catching enough attention to nab web-series roles in between her indie comedies. She appeared in the very likable high-school sex comedy The To-Do List, co-starring Bill Hader and written and directed by his wife Maggie Carey, and the surprisingly affecting Duplass brothers-produced Safety Not Guaranteed.

Will Ferrell and Aubrey Plaza during the 2013 MTV Movie Awards. Photograph: Kevin Mazur/WireImage

She has also made a side career of excellent chatshow appearances and red-carpet and awards show outrages. There’s footage of her harshly glaring down her impudent Scott Pilgrim co-star Michael Cera – not in jest, it would seem. At the 2013 MTV Movie Awards, she leapt on stage and wrested Will Ferrell’s award from his hands. Ferrell went with it as though it were a bit, but Plaza got chucked out afterwards. On Conan O’Brien’s show, she was seen smiling and laughing before she caught the camera and very consciously, veryslowly deadened her face into the full Ludgate, before silently mouthing the words “fuuuuuuuuuuuuck yooooouu,” to rather magnificent effect. “You gotta give ’em what they want!” she says.

“What’s next?” I ask.

“I just shot a movie in Italy where I play a nun who’s actually a witch,” she says, “called The Little Hours.”

Oh, I say, I thought it was called The Little Horse. She mishears me. “The Little Whooooooooooores? I’m gonna call the director and ask him to rename it because I like that title way better!”

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