Check out some clips of Aubrey Plaza from her appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” last night!

The nominations for the 2023 Screen Actors Guild Awards were announced, and The White Lotus season 2 received two nominations! The cast of the show received a nomination for “Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series,” and Jennifer Coolidge received a nomination for “Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series.”

Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series
“Better Call Saul”
“The Crown”
“Ozark”
“Severance”
“The White Lotus”

The show will air on Netflix’s YouTube channel this year and then move to the streamer in 2024. The ceremony will take place Sunday, February 26th, at Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles.

Aubrey Plaza will be hosting Saturday Night Live on January 21st! Make sure you check it out live on NBC at 11:30 ET!

When Aubrey Plaza read the script for “Emily the Criminal,” an electric Los Angeles-set thriller about a young woman with a criminal record, a mountain of student debt and few job prospects, she knew she wanted to take on the role — in large part because it was something different, something she hadn’t tackled before.

“A lot of times,” she says, “I’ll be talking about a project with someone, and they’ll go, ‘We’ll tailor it just for you! We’ll rewrite it just for you!’ And that’s my nightmare. I’m like, ‘I don’t want you to do that. You don’t know who I am — you think you know, but you don’t.’ I’m an actor — just let me act.”

The 38-year-old star got her wish, resulting in one of 2022’s most startling performances. Although best known for her sardonic turns on “Parks and Recreation” and in idiosyncratic indies such as “Black Bear,” Plaza found a steelier, more desperate gear as the financially strapped Emily, who gets sucked into the black-market world of “dummy shopping,” where stolen credit card numbers are used to purchase high-end goods. Also serving as a producer, which she’s done on several of her recent pictures, Plaza is both rawer and more vulnerable in “Emily the Criminal” than she’s ever been, earning acting nominations for the Gotham and Independent Spirit awards.

“I didn’t really think about how I was going to play it,” she says. “I just knew that I wanted to be her.” Eventually, she and writer-director John Patton Ford also realized that Theo Rossi, who plays Youcef, the head of this criminal operation, whose interest in Emily blossoms from a business partnership into a romance, would be the perfect co-star.

“John called me after he met Theo and was like, ‘This is our guy,’” she says during a mid-December video call. “When I got on a Zoom with Theo, he started giving me s— and busting my b—. It just felt like we knew each other — we were super comfortable sparring immediately.”

Rossi, who received a Spirit nomination as well, smiles as Plaza relates that anecdote, adding, “The second we got on [the call], it was like, ‘OK, we need to do this. I don’t know if anyone will ever see it, but we’re going to make something cool.’”

But to get to the point of casting Rossi, Plaza first had to spend years trying to secure “Emily the Criminal’s” financing. Partly, the difficulty was first-time feature filmmaker Ford’s lack of a track record. But, as Plaza notes, “I think it was [also] a me problem. It’s always interesting what position you’re in as an actor, what number you can greenlight a movie at — it changes all the time. And I think it was a script problem: It’s an action movie, there’s car-chase sequences, and I basically said, ‘I want to make this movie for $5 million or more.’ I wanted it to look good. It was just hard — the independent film business is rough, and it’s been rough out there for a while.”

The movie examines the criminal underworld with clear-eyed bluntness as the seemingly unassuming Emily discovers, to her shock, that she can acquit herself nicely around dangerous individuals. But for Rossi, whose Youcef has gotten involved in dummy shopping because he’s an immigrant seeking a piece of the American dream, the character’s struggles resonated with his own upbringing.

“I’ve grown up around every level of criminal, from white-collar to petty thieves to full-blown lock-up, life-in-prison criminals,” he says. “A lot of people don’t want to be in criminal situations. Some of the best people I’ve ever met have been in the criminal element — they have dreams and they have hopes, but they’re in a bad position. What I loved so much was that [Youcef] doesn’t want to be in this life — he just wants a better life for his mom, which is so admirable.”

The disarming sweetness Rossi brings to Youcef is juxtaposed with the rattling, barely concealed anxiety Plaza lends to Emily, who must navigate several frightening situations, from stealing a car to being assaulted by crooks in her apartment, never once allowing herself to lose her cool. Asked how she harnessed such a white-knuckle performance, Plaza says, “I think the nature of the production came into play,” an acknowledgment that “Emily the Criminal,” now streaming on Netflix, was filmed in just three weeks. “Every day was really hard. We were in all the real locations — the actors that we had were so great that I felt transported. Craig Stark, a brilliant actor who breaks into my apartment, when I saw him, I immediately knew, ‘This is going to be a really long night for me, this is going to be tough, this feels really real.’ I allowed myself to just surrender to the circumstances.”

Just as surprising as Emily’s embrace of the criminal life is her growing attraction to Youcef, who starts off as her prickly boss but soon reveals his sensitive side. The characters’ palpable sexual chemistry seems to be a byproduct of the ribbing the actors gave each other in their initial Zoom meeting, but what adds spark is the question of whether Emily and Youcef’s courtship is actually true love — or if they’re just two opportunists both longing to break free of financial hardships.

“I’m such a romantic, I always want to root for the love story,” Plaza offers. “[What] was the most appealing thing about this movie is this unexpected love story. That’s why people go to the movies — they want to watch people fall in love. I think it was a real love story.”

Rossi doesn’t entirely agree. “It’s a complicated thing,” he replies. “Some people who are married for 30 years, there’s something they need from each other. And I think that there is a need that [Emily and Youcef] had for each other. I think that she represented hope for him — she really is the leader of that relationship; she’s his cheerleader. I’m a deep romantic at heart, and I think he just absolutely loved her. But I also think she’s a survivalist.”

The ambiguity of their romance — and the movie’s refusal to resolve itself tidily — is emblematic of a bygone age of risk-taking American cinema, one that Plaza and Rossi clearly adore, considering how admiringly they discuss John Cassavetes and the New Hollywood era. Appropriately for a film featuring characters fighting to find something lasting in a world that seems to have little room for them, the actors who brought Emily and Youcef to life want to make a mark in an industry that’s systematically squeezing out smart, low-budget movies like theirs.

“I mean, that’s what I love about [‘Emily the Criminal’]: It feels old-school,” Plaza says. “Not to brag, but I was just talking to Kevin Bacon. I’m not going to put words in his mouth, but he loved the movie, and we were nerding out about it. He was saying, ‘Yeah, it reminds me of movies from the ‘70s and how movies used to feel.’ You’re dropped into a really interesting character’s world and you just spend some time with them. Movies used to be like that — there’s not a lot of original stories like that anymore.”

Source: LA Times

Aubrey Plaza has an unrivaled candor that lends itself to honest interviews—not to mention scene-stealing performances on everything from workplace sitcoms to Marvel series to gritty crime thrillers. Here, the “White Lotus” and “Emily the Criminal” star opens up about her biggest career mistake and her exasperation with the word “deadpan.”

What’s one performance every actor should see and why?
Gena Rowlands in “A Woman Under the Influence.” That’s the obvious one for me, because she’s just so good. You can’t take your eyes off of her.

Of all the roles you’ve played, which one shaped you the most as an actor?
That’s a really hard question. I’m like, “Um, ‘Dirty Grandpa?’ ” The role that most shaped me as an actor? Fuck you. I’m going to just say “Ingrid Goes West.” I don’t know why. There’s just something that happened on that movie that felt like: OK, we’re getting into some shit now.

Have you ever been surprised by the audience reaction to one of your characters?
I’m surprised every time. I’m so sick of hearing how all my characters are the same. I don’t know what it is; there’s something about me. Soon, I’m going to get into the world of prosthetics. I’m going to start doing some Meryl Streep shit where I change my nose and I change my hair so people can just completely forget that it’s me. When I do something new, there’s always that one person who says, “There she goes, doing the Aubrey Plaza thing again.” I want to go, like, “Fuck you, dude.” I can’t change the sound of my voice. I only have my own instrument to work with. I sound bitter, but I’m not. I am always surprised that people use this “deadpan” description about some things that I’ve done. It just feels a little reductive to me. But that’s my journey.

What do the best directors you’ve worked with have in common?
They have respect for the crew and a collaborative approach. I love working with directors who are not controlling and who treat everybody—from the star of the movie to the craft services assistant—the same. They understand that all of the people involved in the moviemaking [process] are important. All of that energy is important for the film. That’s the quality I really, really like the most and that I’ve found most successful: an open, collaborative, respectful approach.

What’s one mistake you’ve made in your career that you’ll never make again?
Signing up for a movie where the script isn’t good—actually, excuse me, where the script isn’t great. Because you fool yourself into thinking, This is good, but later, we’ll be able to make it better. It’s just not true. You don’t have the time. I’m not going to do that again.

Source: Backstage

Streaming Guide JustWatch has revealed that Emily the Criminal and The White Lotus topped the streaming charts last week, making Aubrey Plaza the first actor to have #1 movies and TV shows at the same time on streaming.

Source: Cult MTL

Aubrey Plaza appeared as a guest on The Drew Barrymore Show today! Check out her interview below.

Aubrey Plaza was a guest on Late Night with Seth Meyers last night! Check out her interview in the video below.

On this episode of Actually Me, Aubrey Plaza goes undercover on the Internet and responds to real comments from Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, YouTube and more. How often did she improvise as April Ludgate on Parks and Rec? What witchy thing did she do to prank her White Lotus castmates? Is she really named after a Bread song?

According to Aubrey Plaza, living in a five-star hotel in Sicily is not the paradise we think it is. The vibe can shift from Eloise to Jack Torrance pretty quickly. For her, it took only a month.

Last February, Plaza, along with the rest of the cast and crew of the HBO series The White Lotus, holed up at the Four Seasons San Domenico Palace for five months to film the show’s second season. The hotel, a centuries-old convent in the seaside town of Taormina, was shuttered to actual tourists so that the actors could play fictional ones. “A Charlie Kaufman experiment,” as Plaza puts it, with no retreat from work. Every time she stuck her head into the hallway, she heard “motore, motore, motore!” (“rolling” in Italian) echoing from some marbled corner of the property. Every time she returned to her room, a staffer was inside performing an unsolicited task. Eventually, she hung a do not disturb sign on the door and began blasting R.E.M. She ignored pleas from housekeeping. “I was a suspicious character for these Italians,” she says. “They thought I was sketchy. Which I am.”

Then, in March, things got weird. One of Plaza’s costars, Adam DiMarco, discovered the reed diffusers that normally scent the hotel’s nooks and terraces had been arranged in a large Blair Witch–style symbol on the floor of his dressing room. A few days later, Plaza’s dressing room was similarly defiled. Furious, she started freaking out to fellow cast members Haley Lu Richardson and Meghann Fahy. “Who did this?” she demanded. Was it a prank? A poltergeist? The ghost of a nun who, centuries later, still can’t be a priest? No one knew.

Well, the hotel staff knew. “It’s Ms. Plaza,” they agreed. They proffered security footage. Plaza swore it wasn’t her. She threw suspicion on her similarly dark-haired Italian costars. “It was Beatrice! It was Simona!” Papers with ominous messages that read here lies… were being slipped under people’s doors. “I was definitely questioning my reality for a while there,” says DiMarco. Over bottles of red wine, Plaza assured him she wasn’t to blame until eventually he recruited a mole of his own: “I didn’t know who to trust. It was like Murder on the Orient Express. Everyone was the murderer.”

But it was Ms. Plaza. Of course, it was Ms. Plaza. “She’s a disruptor by nature,” says her close friend Mike White, creator of The White Lotus. For the sake of work and self-preservation, White avoided the chaos. “Aubrey’s the most fun. I said to her face, if I’m on a cross-country trip, I want nothing more than for you to be on that bus with me. But if I’m driving the bus, and you are on it, I want you off the bus.”

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