The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Is this the female Bill Murray?
Aubrey Plaza, the ultra-dry Parks and Recreation comic, on turning on-set sadism into movie gold
Shortly after she turned 31, Aubrey Plaza received a telephone call from her agent she would never forget: she had been cast in a film opposite Robert De Niro. But a few months later, another, less happy conversation took place, in which she was warned that she was making her legendary co-star deeply uncomfortable on set.
The film was the raunchy 2016 comedy Dirty Grandpa, in which De Niro played an elderly widower on a wild Florida holiday, and Plaza his outrageously younger love interest. “When I got the part, I thought, ‘If I’m working with De Niro, I’m going to bring my A-game,’” Plaza, now 36, recalls on a Zoom call from her home in northern California. “So while in the script it was a very thin relationship, on set I was just digging and digging, fully going method, hitting on him constantly and coming onto him so hard.”
Around halfway through the shoot, though, an unforeseen flaw in this strategy emerged. “My agent called me and asked, ‘What’s going on over there? Because I’m hearing that Bob’s, you know, getting weirded out by you.’ It turned out he was terrified of me.”
In fact, Plaza was so committed to her character – a filthy-mouthed, bikini-clad party girl called Lenore – that at a cast lunch hosted by De Niro that Sunday, he didn’t recognise her when she arrived sans spray tan and flowing wig.
“I mean, we had even kissed a couple of times by that point,” she says. “I was like, ‘Bob, it’s Aubrey. It’s Lenore.’ And then he loved me after that. After he realised I wasn’t insane, we had the best time.”
Chalk it up as a false start. When Plaza sprung to fame 11 years ago, in the sitcom Parks and Recreation and the Judd Apatow film Funny People, it was her knack for unflinching, unflappable deadpan that caught viewers’ notice. But in the past few years, she has sidestepped into producing in order to find roles that test and unnerve her – rather than her co-stars.
Her most recent such project was 2017’s Ingrid Goes West, a nerve-splintering comic thriller in which she played a social-media addict who worms her way into her favourite influencer’s covetable life. Coming next – completed before the pandemic, and arriving on British screens this week – is the dark, dreamlike drama
Black Bear, about creative, sexual and metaphysical turmoil at a remote artistic retreat.
Black Bear was written and directed by Lawrence
Michael Levine, whom Plaza met on the Netflix series
Easy. The two bonded over what she describes as the
“complicated and messy” business of making films with their significant others – she had recently starred in her partner
Jeff Baena’s zombie comedy Life After Beth
– and their talk sparked an idea for a script. A year later, Levine met
Plaza for a coffee, handed over the Black Bear screenplay, and asked her to play the lead.
Or should that be leads? At the start of the film, her character Allison is a sardonic, self-amused indie filmmaker, but – and here, the spoiler-averse are advised to skip to the next paragraph – later morphs into an actress on the verge of a nervous breakdown, wrestling with a role that seems partly inspired by her alternate self’s experiences. The sense that these events are occurring inside a bubble reality is only heightened by the setting: a lake house buried deep in the Adirondack mountains, far from the reach of any mobile network, which doubled as accommodation for most of Black Bear’s cast and crew. Some actors played crew members, while other crew members acted, further muddying the bounds between fiction and fact.
The “drama, fighting and other crazy s---” that unfold on screen in Black Bear are, she says, grimly typical of independent film sets, with the sadistic mind games played by Allison’s director and husband Gabe (Christopher Abbott) – who wants to goad her into giving the rawest possible performance – being a typical case in point.
“I’ve definitely had experiences
‘Can manipulation ever elicit a great performance? Yes. Is it ethical to do it? No’
where I’ve felt that that was happening to me,” she says. “And it’s a struggle to not think that in some way it’s not only helpful but that you deserve it. There are definitely times I’ve said to myself, ‘Well, it’s good for the work, you know?’”
And is it? “Can manipulation ever elicit a great performance? Yes. Is it ethical to do it? No, I don’t think so. For so long we’ve romanticised directors as these mad geniuses that manipulate their actors, and told stories about actors that were somehow tricked into doing their greatest work. But it’s not necessary. It’s when actors feel safe that they can give everything. I think that hopefully those days are gone, and people won’t put up with that behaviour any more because it’s just narcissistic, toxic bulls---.”
Any remaining doubts that Black Bear was written with Plaza in mind will be scrubbed by an early exchange in the film, in which a character describes Allison as “really hard to read”. Smiling inscrutably, she counters that she is in fact “so easy to read that people get confused and make it harder on themselves”.
Throughout our conversation, Plaza is breezy, funny company, and only drops into an affectless, ultra-dry register to illustrate just how far removed from it she is. (“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says in an icy monotone, when I bring it up.) Nevertheless, thanks to those early roles – she appeared as the apathetic April Ludgate in 126 episodes of Parks and Recreation over six years – it’s become something of a trademark, for better or worse.
Today, she wonders if there was “something in the air” the week she travelled from New York to Los Angeles in 2008 to audition for Parks and Recreation, and the films Funny People and Scott Pilgrim vs the World (and, impressively, was cast in all three). “All three characters had the same flavour – people just wanted that deadpan millennial kind of actor. And I wasn’t known in New York as a sarcastic performer.”
In fact, Plaza was there on what she calls “the Saturday Night Live track”. Since her childhood in Wilmington, Delaware, she had dreamt of joining the cast of the weekly sketch show, and moved to New York to pursue that goal, via a degree in film and an apprenticeship on the city’s improv circuit. This career plan was temporarily derailed when she suffered a stroke at 20 and had to return to Wilmington
to recuperate. But a few years later she was working on the show as an intern and was preparing to audition when she flew to LA for that fateful, career-making week.
These days, variety is the name of the game. During lockdown she bubbled in Turkey with Jason Statham and Hugh Grant, where the three filmed the forthcoming Guy Ritchie thriller Five Eyes, while this summer she will appear opposite Michael Caine (“one of those legends that is everything you wanted him to be,” she beams) in the publishing drama Best Sellers.
Even so, Plaza says that the perception of her as “this eye-rolling, disaffected person that couldn’t give a s--- about anything” has “become unavoidable. I’ve struggled with trying to prove myself, but at a certain point you have to accept that you have no control over how anyone perceives you. Now I’m trying to take it as a compliment, because if I’m doing such a good job at acting that you think I’m being
‘I was going fully method on Robert De Niro, hitting on him constantly’
myself, then I guess I have won.”
Perhaps that’s something she has in common with performers such as Tom Hanks, I suggest: when audiences think they know what you stand for, that image becomes something you can play with.
“Well, I have been referred to as the Tom Hanks of my generation,” she replies, with a millpond ripple of irony, before adding that in 10 years she’s going to thwart expectations by “getting into the prosthetics game. You have no idea. I’m ready for that. I’ve just got to work my way up to it.”
More seriously, she has recently found herself wondering if there is a double standard at work. “Can men get away with being themselves on screen more than women? I don’t know. But I think it’s interesting that while we praise actresses like Meryl Streep for transforming themselves with every role, we don’t have a female Bill Murray.”
Unless, that is, it turns out to have been Plaza all along.