Plaza Suite

Yes, she can play deadpan millennial chaos like nobody else. But Aubrey Plaza has shown all kinds of range on the road from Parks and Recreation to The White Lotus. Now she's in league with both Marvel and Francis Ford Coppola

- By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd. Photographs by Dan Jackson

AUBREY PLAZA JUST saw the Sopranos finale for the first time, and she’s beside herself. “I’m shook,” she says, having somehow avoided Tony Soprano discourse for 16 years. She coordinated her viewings with her actor friend Jake Johnson, and they’ve been texting about the ambiguous blackout ending ever since: “Yesterday I was like, ‘Oh my God, what do you think happened?’ And he was like, ‘I don’t know but I was crying,’ and I was like, ‘I was crying too.’ ” Plaza knows how odd all this sounds. “I was like, ‘This is ridiculous, that we’re going through Sopranos finale stuff.’ ”

Plaza finally feasted on the series that birthed prestige television while making the second season of another obsession-inducing show, The White Lotus. She was starring alongside Michael Imperioli, who played the tragic Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos, and figured if she had plot questions, she could just ask him. When I ask Plaza why she’d never watched the show before—not judging, just curious—she says she doesn’t really have any streaming subscriptions and hasn’t seen her season of The White Lotus either. I offer to give her my HBO password, but she vehemently declines. She hates apps and can never figure out how to make streaming actually stream.