Archive for the 'Interviews' Category

CT Interviews: Aubrey Plaza

Last week, the Student Programming Board welcomed universal Woman Crush Wednesday Aubrey Plaza as the Yellow Jacket Weekend Performer. And, to put the icing on the cake, Wilson Commons Student Activities made the mistake of asking me if I wanted to interview her in collaboration with WRUR 88.5.

Fresh out of an Uber (she’s just like us) and after wrapping filming at 7 a.m. two hours north in Canada, Ms. Plaza met me in Rochester’s fifth most romantic spot: Lower Strong Auditorium. Some

Time Magazine recently called you ‘the Low-Key Movie Star of our Times,’ with your increased popularity and your obvious acting range, how do you decide what projects you chose?

Well, it’s two-pronged. One is, obviously, just if the script is good and if I like it. It always starts with the script. Well maybe three prongs. Script. Character. I get bored really easily so I’m always trying to find a new character that is doing something that I haven’t done before. Even if it’s hard to do that. Also, I have a weird thing where whatever I choose to do I try to connect it to what I’m doing in my real life. Almost energetically, like if I want to bring something energetically dark or if I need lightness and laugh and just have fun. Sometimes I just make decisions about just where I’m at.

Getting your break from a comedy like “Parks and Recreation,” you’ve since expanded your roles to more serious dramas, such as your lead in “Emily the Criminal.” How have you been able to keep yourself out of a type-cast box?

It’s hard. It’s kinda a matter of just constantly making weird left turns and not just doing the easy thing. I noticed that after I was in “Parks” that I would just keep getting offered things that were in the same wheelhouse. It’s kinda just about challenging yourself. I’ve also been kinda a workaholic and so I think the amount of jobs that I have done has helped with that. I’ve kinda just been bouncing around since. But you never know who’s gonna actually see the stuff you’re doing and if they’re actually gonna care. I could do all these independent films and think this is a totally different kind of character, but no one could see them and they could still think about the most popular character you’ve done. It’s kinda just about trying to surprise people and changing up.

Is there an album, song, or musical artist that defined your early 20s?

I listen to really old music. I was probably listening to Talking Heads and Radiohead a lot when I was in my 20s, but I don’t know what I would pick. Also, David Bowie’s low album was definitely a thing. I’m so bad at picking one thing.

You’ve been pretty vocal in interviews about your dabbling with Witchy and Spiritual practices. Are there any rituals (spiritual or not) that you practice before a performance or interview like this?

I don’t think I’ve done rituals before interviews. Definitely before I start a movie, especially if I’m doing two completely different things, I like to do a reset. So I’ll go someplace by myself and do a mushroom type of ritual just to shake off and reset. Witchcraft wise it’s based off the moon and sometimes I’ll get lucky with a supermoon and I’ll piggyback on that and use the energy from that to pick up. I don’t have any rituals for an interview though, I kind of wish I had.

Do you find it to be significant when it does fall on a moon day like that?

Oh, I just finished shooting “White Lotus,” and we finished wrapping on the last supermoon of the year, and the shoot was really emotionally intense and it felt like a chapter ending.

If you had a chance to replace any actor for their character in a film, what role would you want to play?

So many, so many people. This is super fresh in my mind but have you seen “Irma Vep?” It’s on HBO and Alicia Vikander plays that role and I finished the series and I thought that it was a good role and I would like it. I don’t know though. Maybe like Julianne Moore in “Boogie Nights” and Sigourney Weaver in “Alien.”

Source: Campus Times

The Reinvention of Aubrey Plaza

In “Emily the Criminal” (now in theaters), Aubrey Plaza plays a hapless, desultory young woman weighed down by student loans like Atlas by the Earth. Because of her police record, Emily can only hold down a food delivery job. Her prospects are grim. When a man named Youcef (Theo Rossi) offers Emily employment as a dummy shopper, purchasing valuable goods with sham credit cards, she accepts, hesitantly at first, then with gusto; lucrative payouts outweigh the hazards and amorality, so Emily digs herself deeper into this scammer world until she hits illicit subsoil.

Plaza sweats anxiety and breathes determination. Partly that’s the performance. The combined conditions of life as a black-market capitalist and life as 30-something jetsam circling a debt whirlpool keep Emily rotating through states of sober agency and abject alarm. Partly, though, Emily’s grit is Plaza’s. The nerves could be, too. Whether she has something to prove as an actress or she’s too self-assured to care, Plaza has continually reinvented herself with roles she has taken both during and after her seven-season stint on the hit political comedy series “Parks and Recreation”; she’s been eminently watchable since 2009, but in “Emily the Criminal,” Plaza fully cements her charisma in pathos.

Raunchy rom-coms (“The To Do List”), dark comedies (“Ingrid Goes West,” “The Little Hours,” the recently released “Spin Me Round”), D.I.Y. time travel adventures (“Safety Not Guaranteed”), the occasional horror film (“Life After Beth,” the 2019 “Child’s Play” reboot), reality-bending art films about reality-bending art films (“Black Bear”); as “Parks and Recreation” ran, and particularly on approaching its 2015 conclusion, Plaza steered her image as the sardonic, disaffected intern April Ludgate into fresh domains. She did that not by abandoning the characteristics of cynicism and apathy that defined Ludgate, but by reframing the way those qualities shape her performances.

Aubrey Plaza Constantly Lied As A 30 Rock Tour Guide

Aubrey Plaza, a former NBC Page, reveals some of the lies she used to tell while giving tours of 30 Rock.

Aubrey Plaza Teases ‘The White Lotus’ Season 2: ‘I Think People Are Going to Be Surprised’

Welcome to The White Lotus — or maybe we should say Benvenuto! For fans who fell in love with HBO’s hit dark comedy, the show’s second season can’t come soon enough.

While viewers await the premiere, reportedly slated for this October, HBO and the season’s cast members have been dropping some crumbs as to what’s in store when the show heads to the south of Italy.

As one of the new faces joining the show, Aubrey Plaza told ET’s Cassie DiLaura she’s been wanting to work with The White Lotus’ creator, Mike White. “To be brought into that family,” Plaza says,”…it’s everything to me.” Plaza will reportedly play Harper Spiller, a woman vacationing with her husband and some friends.

In the midst of continued hype around the show more than a year after its debut (hello, 11 Emmy nominations), Plaza assured fans will be getting something fresh with the second season in Sicily.

“I know it’s a lot to live up to, but Mike is so good about making the second season different,” she says. “It’s still The White Lotus, but now it’s in Italy, so it has a totally different vibe and so, I think people are going to be surprised.”

Aubrey Plaza Reveals She Pranked Her ‘Spin Me Round’ Cast with a Fake Pie-Filled Italian Tradition

Years of playing Parks and Recreation’s resident trickster April paid off for Aubrey Plaza, who executed an epic prank on her co-stars while shooting the film Spin Me Round in Italy.

“I basically made up a little fake Italian tradition,” Plaza revealed to PEOPLE during a special screening of the film – directed by Plaza’s husband Jeff Baena, who also co-wrote it with star Alison Brie – at the London Hotel in West Hollywood. “I told all the actors, ‘When you shoot in Italy, they have a tradition where when you picture-wrap, you get pied in the face.'”

Plaza managed to convince her fellow actors – including Brie, Molly Shannon, Fred Armisen, Debby Ryan, Ego Nwodim and Ayden Mayeri – that made-up tradition was real, and to expect to receive a pie in the face once each of them completed filming.

“All the actors were like, ‘Is that true?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s what the Italians do,” Plaza explained. “And then I really committed to that. And I orchestrated basically a pie for every actor. We have 11 or 12 actors in the movie and it didn’t matter how long the day was, how tired they were. They all got a f—g pie in their face. And now it’s going to stick – I’m going to make it a thing!”

Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza on Reuniting for Indie ‘Spin Me Round’

Following The Little Hours, Horse Girl and Joshy, Jeff Baena and Alison Brie are back for their fourth indie collaboration — and second (after Horse Girl) as co-writers.

Spin Me Round, which Baena also directs and produces while Brie stars and produces, follows a woman who wins an all-expenses-paid trip to Italy through the Italian restaurant where she works, setting up an adventure after she meets the restaurant chain’s wealthy owner.

“After we made our film Horse Girl together, Jeff came to me and said, ‘I read an article about an exemplary managers program that is run out of an Italian chain restaurant in the States,’ and the article sort of outlined how lackluster that program was; how there were big promises of full immersion in Italian culture but actually it was just like a lot of American managers from restaurants hanging out,” Brie told The Hollywood Reporter at the film’s Los Angeles premiere on Wednesday. “We just thought that idea was really funny. He had sort of beaded out the main plot points and I got to come in and really dig into the characters with him.”

The film co-stars Aubrey Plaza, Molly Shannon, Fred Armisen and Debby Ryan, who have all worked with Baena and Brie on their previous films; Brie joked they’re creating a “Baena-verse” and explained why she works so well with Baena and Plaza, who are married.

“The three of us love film, we love filmmaking, we love independent film, so it’s really fun to work with them because they’re so unique in the way that they think about film and storytelling,” she said. “It’s just really satisfying to work on something where the sky’s the limit and you can follow your imagination wherever it goes.”

Plaza said she took on a smaller role in this project as she was working on her new film Emily the Criminal at the same time, opting to become “the cast cheerleader — I was organizing all the social activities, driving people around Tuscany.” And what did those social activities look like? “Just dinners, basically. That’s what you do in Italy: You drink and have long dinners.”

Plaza also celebrated reuniting with several of their longtime comedy friends for the film, noting that Baena “has a shorthand with all of these actors, so I think it just makes the process more fun. When you’re shooting movies it’s a tough life; it’s hard when you’re shooting small movies, so it’s good to feel like it’s all in the family and we’re all friends. It just makes the experience that much richer.”

Spin Me Round hits theaters Friday.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Aubrey Plaza on “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend”

Aubrey Plaza shares the story of how she was cast in “Funny People,” “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World,” and “Parks and Recreation” in the span of a week. Hear more from this episode @ https://listen.teamcoco.com/aubreyplaza.

Aubrey Plaza Interview with PEOPLE in 10

Aubrey Plaza recently talked with “People” about her new movie Emily The Criminal. You can watch it in the video below.

Aubrey Plaza and Theo Rossi Interview with JoBlo

You probably don’t associate the name Aubrey Plaza with dramatic thrillers. Perhaps we should. In the feature film debut from filmmaker John Patton Ford, Emily the Criminal gives the actress one of her most exciting roles to date (read our rave review). Ms. Plaza is exceptional. In it, she portrays Emily, a young woman caught up in a credit card debt scheme. The film also stars Theo Rossi, Barnardo Badillo, Jonathan Avigdori, and Gina Gershon. Ford has crafted a smart and tense feature. And one with a nice change of pace for the film’s leading lady.

We recently sat down with both Aubrey Plaza and Theo Rossi I’ve spoken to Aubrey a few times in the past, and this was my favorite interview that I’ve done with the actress. It was a nice conversation between both Aubrey and her co-star, Mr. Rossi, who I shared a little Sons of Anarchy love with.

Emily the Criminal is an engaging little ride, and it’s well worth checking out.

Aubrey Plaza Interview with NPR

NPR’s Daniel Estrin speaks with actor Aubrey Plaza about her new thriller, “Emily The Criminal,” which centers around a woman who turns to crime to pay off student loan debt.

Source: NPR