- Once nearly pigeonholed for her quirky comedic sensibility, Plaza’s recent dramatic turns are turning heads
- Even so, she will return to her comedy roots as “Saturday Night Live” host this weekend with Sam Smith as musical guest
When Aubrey Plaza left Delaware for New York about 20 years ago to pursue comedy as a fresh-faced Ursuline Academy graduate, “Saturday Night Live” was her motivation.
It took only a couple of years for her to land a gig at historic Studio 8H, even if it was as a design department intern “lurking in the shadows,” as she told Jimmy Fallon on Monday’s “The Tonight Show.”
After nearly two decades in television and film, the actress just completed a breakout year, which earned her a Golden Globe nomination for “The White Lotus” and rave reviews for her intense starring performance in the film “Emily the Criminal.”
And to cap her best year ever, Plaza will return to Rockefeller Center and come out of the shadows as a first-time “Saturday Night Live” host this weekend, paired with musical guest Sam Smith.
When she walks onto the famed stage at 11:30 p.m., she’ll see a small number of friends and family looking back from the audience as her childhood dream comes true. About 4 million people will be watching at home, too.
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Oozing with talent, Plaza has built a fan cult following dating back to her dorky deadpan on “Parks and Recreation” and lately has grown into a bit of a fashion icon, slaying red carpets including on Sunday when she wowed in a custom Louis Vuitton sequined gown with slicked back bleach blonde hair at the Critics Choice Awards.
“Aubrey Plaza can do anything. I don’t see any limits on her,” says Sheila O’Malley, a film critic who wrote a four-star review of the low-budget “Emily the Criminal” for RogerEbert.com in August and has tracked her career for years. “She came up in comedy, she goes super deep as a character actress, but she’s also a leading lady.”
A-List Aubrey does have a nice ring to it.
Plaza’s path to stardom isn’t exactly one an agent would necessarily lay out to land at award shows.
She has made bold choices, ranging from smaller critical darlings (“Ingrid Goes West,” “Black Bear,” “Safety Not Guaranteed”) to films that sometimes don’t quite hit the mark, like playing a zombie in box office bomb “Life After Beth” or famously playing the object of Robert DeNiro’s infatuation in “Dirty Grandpa,” earning Plaza a Worst Supporting Actress Razzie.
Keith Powell, a Saint Mark’s High School graduate and former Wilmington Drama League director, remembers when Plaza first went to Los Angeles after New York University for her first round of auditions, coming back with three projects locked in: “Parks and Recreation,” “Funny People” and “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.”
“She was over the moon,” says Powell, who went on to co-star on NBC’s “30 Rock” and now is busy directing television shows such as “Interview With the Vampire,” “Young Rock” and “Big Sky.” “It felt inevitable that she was going to have the career she’s had.”
How does she pick and choose what projects to do? Even her father doesn’t know. And he’s not asking. The secret recipe has been working just fine. No need to mess with it.
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“It’s all a mystery to me,” says David Plaza, who co-produced “Emily the Criminal,” the first film for his new production company, Fear Knot Productions. “I don’t know if she doesn’t want to jinx herself or get people’s hopes up, but she doesn’t really telegraph what she’s going to do. We find out after the fact most of the time.”
After a string of high-profile successes, the question on everyone’s tongue is whether Plaza is growing into a Hollywood A-Lister before our very eyes. And how would that fit her?
David Plaza says he tries not to think too far ahead when it comes to his daughter’s career. But with her recent streak, he can’t help but play along with the possibility of an A-List Aubrey.
“You know, I wouldn’t be surprised, but I’m not counting on it,” he says. “But I told her over the holidays that if she didn’t do another project, she should be proud of herself for how long she has come in a very, very brutally difficult business.”
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Wilmington Drama League product Dan Murphy, a childhood Plaza friend and longtime creative partner, says she plans on trying directing soon, adding to her resume as an actress, writer and producer.
“She wants to do it all and I think we’ve only scratched the surface so far,” he says. “She’s going to have an amazing career.”
Film critic O’Malley puts it this way: “I totally trust her judgement and I just want to see what she does next.”
Her trajectory seems to have her headed toward “big-time status,” says Lewes-based filmmaker Rob Waters of W Films, although he’s worried it could disrupt one of her major strengths: a knockout character actress in smaller, interesting films.
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“I want her to continue doing these strange projects and not the next Marvel movie or something,” he says. “I’m a little surprised she has gotten so big because she is very distinctive and America doesn’t really like distinctive, we like our things pretty prepackaged and easy to swallow.”
But Powell says she could break the mold of an A-Lister and remake it in her own image, she’s that good.
“No one ever said, ‘Get me a Jennifer Lawrence type’ until Jennifer Lawrence came along,” says Powell, who always told his Wilmington Drama League performers “not to be like everybody else and always be their authentic selves,” advice Plaza ran with.
“Aubrey can define what it is to be A-List,” he adds.
A 2021 to remember
When COVID-19 swept across the globe in 2020, everything stopped, including Hollywood productions. By the next year, there was a bit of backlog, which kept Plaza busy, setting the stage for a breakthrough 2022.
“I’m trying to catch up to it all,” says David Plaza, who has Delaware homes in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach. “In the span of a very short time, she is blowing up.”
Plaza filmed “Emily the Criminal” in the summer of 2021, the first feature film produced by Evil Hag Productions, a production company she runs with Murphy.
By January, the movie was at the Sundance Film Festival and released nationally in August, earning a 94% score on film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. It is currently streaming on Netflix. As O’Malley wrote in her review, the film is ignited by Plaza’s “unpredictable and often thrilling performance.”
A month after she was at Sundance with “Emily,” Plaza found herself at the Four Seasons in Sicily filming the second season of another critic favorite — Mike White’s “The White Lotus,” which earned five Emmy Awards for its first season. Once again, it was a hit for HBO and garnered Plaza’s first Golden Globe nomination, which was won by co-star Jennifer Coolidge earlier this month.
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By August of last year, she also released the well-received FXX animated series “Little Demon,” which co-starred Danny and Lucy DeVito. A couple of months later, “The Return of the Christmas Witch” landed on bookshelves, a sequel to a 2021 Christmas book she co-wrote with Murphy.
In an interview with Delaware Online/The News Journal in August prior to the release of “Little Demon,” Plaza explained how the year came together: “I think there was a slight pandemic backup for me. I pretty much worked for two years back to back, and after nonstop productions, now everything’s coming to a head.”
The result has been Plaza just about everywhere you look recently, even as she’s (mostly) holed up in Atlanta working on her next project, co-starring in legendary director Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating science fiction epic “Megalopolis.” The all-star cast also includes Adam Driver, Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Shia LaBeouf and Dustin Hoffman.
There she was in December at Rockwood Museum in Bellevue signing books for more than 300 hometown fans with Murphy during a visit home for the holidays. On Sunday, she was in Los Angeles in that eye-catching gown presenting the Best Supporting Actor award at the Critics Choice Awards. And on Monday night, she was the lead guest with Fallon talking about “Saturday Night Live.”
“I was a creepy stalker and now I’m going to host it, so my master plan worked,” she told the late-night host.
Delaware loves Aubrey and she loves us back
Even before 2021, Plaza was becoming a household name. Just look at Delaware Online/The News Journal’s 2018 poll to determine the most famous Delawarean, in which she beat out then-former Vice President Joe Biden.
There are plenty of reasons why Delaware loves Plaza: She never forgot where she came from, even if she lives in Los Angeles with filmmaker husband Jeff Baena. She always has proudly represented the First State.
She name-dropped the state in her first major film (Judd Apatow’s “Funny People” in 2009) and comes back all the time to support local nonprofits such as the 4-H Club and the Wilmington Jaycees or to headline fundraisers for the Wilmington Drama League, where she got her start.
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Around the holidays, she usually can be found spending a night at Wilmington’s Dead Presidents Pub & Restaurant, owned by her uncle Brian Raughley. (One year, she was there with fellow Wilmington native actor and Tony Award-winner Johnny Gallagher Jr., who has said Plaza was his first girlfriend at the age of 15.)
Her hometown love even inspired a half-joking campaign to rename Columbus Square, the former site of a Christopher Columbus statue on Wilmington’s Pennsylvania Avenue. It is located across the street from Ursuline Academy, where she graduated in 2002. Plaza herself even climbed on the statue’s pedestal (since removed) in 2021 for a photo.
The name? The Aubrey Plaza Plaza, of course.
Wilmington resident Pete Romano created The Aubrey Plaza Plaza Facebook page pushing for the site to be renamed for the 38-year-old actress. The group has grown to more than 1,200 members, including plenty of Delaware fans, as well as others from France and other faraway places.
As for the proposed name, Romano says, “It was a joke that we thought she would probably appreciate.”
The new name may not be official, but if you look at the site on Google Maps, it’s listed as The Aubrey Plaza Plaza and even features a Photoshopped, yet realistic photo of a Plaza statue atop the pedestal.
Getting laughs at Ursuline
Plaza has been acting since the age of 10, discovering and then developing her skills in productions at Wilmington Drama League and Delaware Theatre Company.
With the support of her parents, David, a financial adviser, and Bernadette, an attorney, Plaza decided to move to New York after graduating from Ursuline to study at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, graduating in 2005.
Before that, her parents had sent Plaza to theater camps and a monthlong film program sponsored by the New York Film Academy at Universal Studios in California.
In high school, she was a class clown of sorts with that trademark off-centered sense of humor that fueled her early career already on full display.
Kay Gaglione, who taught Plaza American history in seventh grade, reminisced with Delaware Online/The News Journal once about having the future star as a pupil.
She remembers walking home from school one day followed by Plaza, who was hidden in a large cardboard box. Gaglione would take a few steps and so would Plaza. When Gaglione would stop and turn around, the box would stop and drop to the sidewalk.
“She was very, very funny. Even then, she was just a riot,” Gaglione recalled.
‘Saturday Night Live’: a pinnacle moment
A fan of “Saturday Night Live” since middle school, she credits the show with inspiring her push to make acting her career.
“I never thought I could turn that into something until after I started watching ‘SNL’ and getting into other TV and film comedies,” she told Delaware Online/The News Journal in 2010. “I was making people laugh in my everyday life and these people were getting paid for it, so I figured I should learn how to do that.”
While at NYU, she took improv classes through Upright Citizens Brigade Theater while also setting her sights on “Saturday Night Live” itself.
Plaza sent resumes for an internship to every single department at the show and was accepted by the design department. She worked (and lurked) there for the entire 2004-2005 season, even getting a smooch from Bono the night U2 was the musical guest.
So when she got the news she was going to host this weekend, it was one of the biggest moments of her career.
“We all literally jumped 3 feet in the air,” says David Plaza, who will be in the crowd taking it all in as any proud parent would. “That was a pinnacle moment.”
Have a story idea? Contact Ryan Cormier of Delaware Online/The News Journal at rcormier@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2863. Follow him on Facebook (@ryancormier) and Twitter (@ryancormier).