OBSERVER – If you are standing right now, I suggest you sit down, because we’re going to begin with some truly shocking news: Aubrey Plaza is not a 50-year-old man.

Truthfully, this should be clear to anyone who has followed Plaza on her rise to stardom over the years—the seven seasons portraying the human embodiment of an eye-roll, April Ludgate, on NBC’s Parks & Recreation, her quieter standout roles in indies like Safety Not Guaranteed and Ned Rifle, or more recent big-screen endeavors like Mike & Dave Need Wedding Dates. Certainly, it’s clear to me, sitting across from the actress at a Los Feliz noodle bar, a month before she’s set to co-star in Legion, FX’s Marvel-universe mind-bender from Fargo creator Noah Hawley.

But is it clear to Hawley? Harder to say. In the original pilot script for Legion, Hawley wrote the character of Lenny Busker as a male, middle-aged former drug-addict, the resident, older sage of Clockworks Psychiatric Hospital, providing both optimism and advice to our mutant main character David Haller (Dan Stevens). The question becomes, What made the writer-director, after a single meeting with Plaza, decide the 32-year-old actress would be a perfect fit for the part?

“Honestly, I don’t know, and I don’t want to know,” she says and laughs, before changing tact. “I mean, no, I get it. I think that maybe that’s my real, underneath persona, and at heart, I’m like a 50-year-old drug addict living in a mental hospital. And Noah saw that’s who I am, really, underneath it all.” (read more at the source)