I was first introduced on screen to Aubrey Plaza when I watched the TV series Parks and Recreation. Back when she wasn’t Aubrey Plaza but was that woman who looks like she’s casting a hex on you every time she stares at you! But I quickly began to realize she is more than just a doom and gloom sitcom character. She’s got serious talent and is now one of my favorite actors.

Plaza was born in Wilmington, Delaware in 1984 and she was a shy and quiet kid until she discovered community theater in middle school. Since then she has been performing in theatrical productions in high school, also learning about filmmaking at the New York Film Academy’s summer camp in 2001 before officially moving to New York to study film and television at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts. But before that Plaza also took improv classes in Philadelphia. So the woman could not only act but she could also act completely on the fly, which led to her eventual association with the Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) Theatre in 2004. Plaza even described UCB co-founder Amy Poehler as one of her comedic inspirations.

While she wasn’t a stand-up comedian, Plaza would occasionally perform at the Laugh Factory and the Improv, but what really got her foot in the door in Hollywood was her internship at Saturday Night Live during that show’s 2004-05 season, eventually becoming an NBC page. Around that time she began acting in short films and web series with her fellow comedians for such companies as Funny Or Die, even landing an appearance in Tina Fey’s sitcom 30 Rock.

The big turning point in her career came when Judd Apatow cast her in the role of a stand-up comedian as well as Seth Rogen’s love interest in the 2009 film Funny People. Although that film was not as popular as Apatow’s previous films, when Plaza flew to Los Angeles to film it, casting director Allison Jones saw something in her and set up a meeting with TV writers Greg Daniels and Michael Schur who at the time were developing a mockumentary sitcom for NBC called Parks and Recreation.

The comedy starred Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope, an optimistic bureaucrat in the parks department of a fictional town called Pawnee, Indiana, and Daniels and Schur planned to give Poehler’s character an assistant. Although originally planned as an airhead type, Plaza pitched them on the idea of an intern who cares more about college credit than her job. Daniels and Schur agreed, the character of April Ludgate was born and Parks and Recreation would run for 7 seasons from 2009 to 2015 with Aubrey Plaza becoming one of the show’s breakout stars.

She has acted in many shows since then, including Portlandia, Drunk History (where she played Sacagawea, Aaron Burr and Cleopatra), Welcome to Sweden, Criminal Minds, the Marvel series Legion and The White Lotus, also lending her voice to animated series like The Legend of Korra, Golan the Insatiable, SpongeBob SquarePants, HarmonQuest, Calls, Duncanville, Little Demon, The Simpsons and Monsters at Work for which she reprised her role as Claire from the Pixar film Monsters University.

Many independent films followed, most of which flew under the radar of the mainstream. Some of the highlights of this period include her role in Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) as Julie Powers (a role Plaza reprised through voice in the 2023 animated series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off) and her role as Darius Britt in Colin Trevorrow’s sci-fi comedy Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) co-starring Mark Duplass as a man who puts out a want ad for someone to help him travel back in time.

Aside from those films, Plaza starred in very few critical or commercial hits. Until 2017, which is the year she began producing her own films. It turns out all she needed was a producer who understands her.

The first of her producing efforts was Jeff Baena’s The Little Hours (2017), a black comedy set in the 1300s (although improvised by the actors with contemporary dialogue) starring Plaza as a nun alongside fellow nuns Alison Brie and Kate Micucci and based on Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th century short stories. The Sundance Film Festival favorite received a positive reception, but that same year Plaza produced an even bigger critical and commercial hit called Ingrid Goes West, starring Plaza as an obsessed fan who moves to L.A. to stalk her Instagram idol played by Elizabeth Olsen.

Her winning streak of acclaimed indie films continued with Lawrence Michael Levine’s psychological drama Black Bear (2020) which fascinated critics with its mind-bending nature, many of whom called the film a career best for Plaza. And her last producing effort, which is by far one of her best films, is Emily the Criminal (2022), John Patton Ford’s crime thriller about a millennial woman saddled with student debt and whose job prospects are hampered by a criminal record, causing her to break the law to make ends meet.

Plaza occasionally still finds good roles outside of her own Evil Hag Productions. She got to star alongside Chucky in the 2019 remake of Child’s Play (which was successful but lukewarm in its critical reception), she played the ex-girlfriend of Mackenzie Davis in Clea Duvall’s holiday rom-com Happiest Season (2020) and apparently she still loves doing weird indie sci-fi because she recently starred in Megan Park’s comedy My Old Ass (2024) as the older version of a girl played by Maisy Stella who goes back in time to warn her younger self not to fall in love. In the same month that film is being released, audiences will also get to see her collaborate with Francis Ford Coppola on his huge and original, self-financed passion project Megalopolis and with Marvel Studios in their new Disney+ series Agatha All Along, in which she is said to play a witch (a part I’m assuming she got because of those hex-casting eyes I mentioned).