Aubrey Plaza

Aubrey Plaza
Plaza at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival
Aubrey Plaza
Born	Aubrey Christina Plaza 6/26/1984
Birthplace	Wilmington, Delaware, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Actress, comedian, producer
Known for	Parks and Recreation, Legion, The White Lotus, Ingrid Goes West, Emily the Criminal
Education	New York University (BFA)

Aubrey Christina Plaza (born June 26, 1984) is an American actress, comedian, writer, and producer. After training in improvisational and sketch comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York, she became widely recognized for her role as the deadpan municipal employee April Ludgate on the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation (2009–2015). Plaza has since built a film and television career marked by dark comedies, independent dramas, and prestige cable series, frequently playing morally ambiguous or emotionally detached characters whose surface flatness conceals interior turbulence.

Plaza made her film debut in Mystery Team (2009) and appeared in a supporting role in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) before headlining the time-travel romantic comedy Safety Not Guaranteed (2012). From 2017 to 2019 she portrayed Lenny Busker on the FX series Legion, and in 2022 she starred in the second season of the HBO anthology series The White Lotus, for which she received nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award. Beginning in 2017, Plaza expanded into producing, financing and starring in the dark comedies The Little Hours and Ingrid Goes West and the dramas Black Bear (2020) and Emily the Criminal (2022).

Early life

Plaza was born on June 26, 1984, in Wilmington, Delaware, and grew up in the surrounding area. She is the eldest of three daughters. Her father, David Plaza, is a financial adviser, and her mother, Bernadette, is an attorney. Plaza's paternal heritage is Puerto Rican, while her mother is of English and Irish descent.

She attended Padua Academy, a Catholic all-girls high school in Wilmington, graduating in 2002. During her teenage years she performed in school theater productions and participated in church and community improvisation groups in the Wilmington area, experiences she later identified as the origin of her interest in comedy. Plaza also worked as a student page at a local Wilmington television station, an experience cited in profiles as an early exposure to professional production environments.

At age twenty, Plaza suffered a stroke, an event she has described publicly in interviews. The medical episode caused temporary expressive aphasia and paralysis, both of which resolved with rehabilitation. She has discussed the stroke as a formative experience that informed both her perspective on her career and her interest in mortality-themed material.

Education

Plaza enrolled at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied film. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the program. While a student in New York, she began taking improv and sketch-comedy classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre (UCB), eventually becoming a member of UCB house teams and performing regularly at the theater's New York venue. She also interned at Saturday Night Live as an NBC page during this period, an arrangement frequently cited in profiles of her early career as her first sustained exposure to network television production.

Career

Early work and breakthrough

Plaza's earliest screen credits were in short-form digital comedy. She appeared in sketches and web series produced for CollegeHumor, including the recurring CollegeHumor original series Troopers, a comedic series set on a Star Wars–style space station. She also appeared in Funny or Die videos, including the short Terrible Decisions with Ben Schwartz.

Plaza made her feature-film debut in Mystery Team (2009), an independent comedy starring Donald Glover and produced by the comedy group Derrick Comedy. Soon afterward, while still relatively unknown, she was cast in two productions that would establish her professional profile: the supporting role of Julie Powers in Edgar Wright's comic-book adaptation Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), and the role of April Ludgate in the second season of NBC's mockumentary sitcom Parks and Recreation. Parks and Recreation, created by Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, ran from 2009 to 2015, and Plaza appeared in the role throughout the series' seven-season run. Her performance — characterized by a flat affect, sardonic delivery, and visible disinterest in the bureaucratic milieu of the fictional Pawnee Parks Department — became one of the show's defining elements.

Film leading roles

Plaza's first leading film role came in Safety Not Guaranteed (2012), directed by Colin Trevorrow. She played Darius, a magazine intern assigned to investigate a man (Mark Duplass) who has placed a newspaper classified seeking a companion for time travel. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and received favorable reviews, with critics highlighting Plaza's ability to ground the film's high-concept premise in restrained, naturalistic emotion.

She subsequently appeared in a range of comedies, including The To Do List (2013), in which she played a high-school valedictorian seeking sexual experience before college, and Life After Beth (2014), a horror comedy in which she portrayed a young woman who returns from the dead. In 2014 she also voiced the title character in Lifetime's holiday film Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever, based on the internet-celebrity cat.

Producing and independent film

Plaza began producing in 2017. She produced and starred in The Little Hours, written and directed by Jeff Baena, a comedy based loosely on stories from Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron in which Plaza played a foul-mouthed medieval nun. The same year she produced and starred in Matt Spicer's Ingrid Goes West, a satire about social-media obsession in which she played the title character, a troubled young woman who relocates to Los Angeles to stalk an Instagram influencer. Ingrid Goes West premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.

In 2018 Plaza starred opposite Emile Hirsch in An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn, directed by Jim Hosking, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. She played Lulu Danger, a discontented wife who runs away from her husband to attend a mysterious "magical event" featuring an old acquaintance.

Plaza produced and starred in Black Bear (2020), an independent psychological drama written and directed by Lawrence Michael Levine, in which she played a filmmaker who travels to a lakeside retreat. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was distributed by Momentum Pictures. She continued in independent drama with Emily the Criminal (2022), written and directed by John Patton Ford, playing a debt-burdened art-school graduate who becomes involved in a credit-card-fraud operation in Los Angeles. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was acquired for distribution by Roadside Attractions and Vertical Entertainment.

Television: Legion and The White Lotus

From 2017 to 2019, Plaza appeared on the FX superhero series Legion, created by Noah Hawley and set in an alternate corner of the X-Men universe. She played Lenny Busker, a character whose identity through the series' first season was revealed to be a manifestation of the telepathic villain known as the Shadow King. Her performance across the series' three seasons drew critical attention for its tonal range, encompassing dark comedy, menace, and surreal musical sequences.

In 2022, Plaza joined the cast of the second season of Mike White's HBO anthology series The White Lotus, set at a luxury resort in Sicily. She played Harper Spiller, a lawyer on vacation with her husband and another couple, whose growing suspicion of the other couple's behavior anchors much of the season's plot. Her performance earned her nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie and for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Series, Miniseries or Television Film, as well as a Screen Actors Guild Award as part of the ensemble cast win for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series.

Hosting and other work

Plaza hosted the 2019 Film Independent Spirit Awards, the annual ceremony recognizing achievement in American independent film. She has appeared as a presenter at numerous awards ceremonies and has been a recurring guest on late-night talk shows, where interviewers and hosts have frequently engaged with her established public persona of deadpan unpredictability.

Personal life

Plaza was in a long-term relationship with filmmaker Jeff Baena, beginning around 2011. The pair collaborated repeatedly, with Baena directing Plaza in Life After Beth, The Little Hours, and Spin Me Round. In 2021, Plaza publicly referred to Baena as her husband in an interview, indicating that the couple had married at some point prior. Baena died in January 2025.

Following Baena's death, Plaza began a relationship with actor Christopher Abbott, with whom she had first worked as a co-star on the 2020 film Black Bear.

Plaza has discussed publicly the stroke she suffered at age twenty, which caused temporary aphasia and paralysis, and she has spoken in interviews about the residual effect of that experience on her perspective. She has also identified at various points as bisexual in published interviews.

Recognition

Plaza's performance as Harper Spiller in The White Lotus brought her the most significant awards recognition of her career to date, including nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Series, Miniseries or Television Film. As part of the ensemble of The White Lotus season two, she shared in the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series.

Her earlier work received recognition primarily within the independent-film community. Safety Not Guaranteed won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, and Ingrid Goes West won the same award in 2017; Plaza's central performance in each was singled out in much of the critical coverage. Emily the Criminal received three Independent Spirit Award nominations following its 2022 release, including a nomination for Best Female Lead for Plaza.

Plaza has been profiled in major publications including Elle, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Delaware Today, often in connection with the contrast between her on-screen deadpan persona and her behind-the-scenes work as a producer of independent films. Her hosting of the 2019 Film Independent Spirit Awards was cited at the time as recognition of her dual identity within the industry as both performer and independent-film producer.