The Audacity Of Aubrey

It’s not her boundary-pushing characters or her refusal to sell out—it’s the fact that she’s openly, obsessively, brazenly focused on making it to the top. And if you get in her way, she’ll swallow you whole.

- Mallory Rice

Almost exactly 10 years ago, Aubrey Plaza was at one of her first real magazine photo shoots. Her memory is not great, she admits, so I help her cobble the scene together: It was a characteristically pleasant day in Santa Monica, at a hotel with a pool in the center of a small courtyard. “Oh my god, right,” she says. “YES.” It was a Young Hollywood–themed shoot, with about a dozen actors assembled for pictures and speedy interviews. At this point in time, 24-year-old Aubrey had already filmed one of her first movie roles, as the stand-up comedian Daisy in Funny People, and her first regular TV gig, as the perpetually unimpressed intern April Ludgate on Parks and Recreation, but neither had been released.

She was pure potential energy that day— nobody knew who she was yet. Except for me, kind of, because I was supposed to be the one interviewing her. “I remember being really scared,” she says. “And insecure. All the other actors had people with them and I didn’t have anyone. I was alone, wandering around, like, ‘Is this where I’m supposed to be?’”

It was a disorienting time in Aubrey’s life overall. She had just moved to L.A. from Queens and had been temporarily living at a Days Inn on Hollywood Boulevard “with a bunch of Swedish tourists” and the comedian Lennon Parham. She was quite literally in the “faking it” part of “fake it till you make it”—in order to secure the role of a standup comic in Funny People, she pretended she already was one in her audition tape (in reality, she was doing improv, which may sound similar but is definitely a different skill set). Then when that worked, she figured she might as well commit to her con and started performing at comedy clubs around L.A.