Interview – Deadpan. That is the word most often used to describe Aubrey Plaza, or at least the characters she’s portrayed on screen. It’s not entirely inaccurate. Since she arrived in Hollywood at the age of 24 after distinguishing herself at the New York improv institution Upright Citizens Brigade, Plaza has dissolved costars into dust with her withering delivery and death-ray stare. She did so most notably as April Ludgate on the otherwise cheery NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation, and in cultish gems such as Funny People and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. But over the last few years, the 36-year-old actor has turned toward darker fare, digging deep into the psyche of a crazed Instagram fangirl in the Sundance hit Ingrid Goes West and an unnerving psychiatric patient on FX’s mind-bending comic book adaptation Legion. Most recently, she plays an enigmatic writer-director who intrudes on a young couple’s life in Lawrence Michael Levine’s twisty psychodrama Black Bear. It’s a performance that is destined to blow minds, including Adam Sandler’s. […]

SANDLER: I’m happy you asked me to do this, buddy. This movie is unbelievable.
PLAZA: Really?

SANDLER: Your performance killed me.
PLAZA: Shut up!

SANDLER: I loved you in it. I couldn’t believe what I saw. This is just a monumental performance. People are going to be so excited seeing this. You dove in there so deep. But let’s talk about other shit first. I’ll ask you some questions. […] The movie is about being on a real movie set, so I thought maybe I’d ask you some questions about being on a movie set. When you’re making a movie, how do you handle eating? […] I know your movie had a lot of night shoots. Do you eat morning, afternoon, and night, or do you switch it? How do you handle the switch?
PLAZA: I eat for fuel. When I’m shooting something, I don’t care about eating. I just eat when people tell me to eat.

SANDLER: But what about when they say, “That’s lunch”? You don’t get excited? Don’t you sometimes ask the AD, “What are we eating?”
PLAZA: It depends on what kind of movie I’m on, because sometimes I’m on small movies where everyone’s eating weird shit. This movie was good because Sarah Gadon, who’s the other actress in it, is really healthy, so she would bring me snacks.

[…] SANDLER: Do you take naps during the day like me?
PLAZA: No, I can’t take naps. I don’t know how to do that. I’m a psycho.

SANDLER: […] How many movies did you do before Funny People?
PLAZA: I did one movie right before that, a very small movie with Donald Glover and a bunch of New York comedy people [2009’s Mystery Team]. That was my first big job. […]

[…] SANDLER: How many days did you shoot this movie for?
PLAZA: I don’t know. Twenty days, maybe? We had to go back and reshoot the first three days on the weekends.

[…] SANDLER: What you did in the last 20 minutes of that movie—with the drunk of it all, and the emotions of it all, and the ups and downs—was so on the money. I’ve never seen anyone play drunk and have to go through what you did. I was so happy it was you and not me, because I could not handle what you do.
PLAZA: That was the scariest part, to play drunk for that many days, because we were shooting nights and I was not mentally prepared for having to throw my body around. I had tremors in my muscles because I was swinging myself around like crazy.

SANDLER: […] How did you meet this director [Lawrence Michael Levine]? This guy is incredible.
PLAZA: We actually just met at a party. His wife is a filmmaker, and I met her first. He’s an indie filmmaker from New York. We were cast as a husband and wife in this Netflix comedy show [Easy], so I met him shooting this thing for five days. He was like, “Since we’re playing a married couple, do you want to do some intimacy exercises on the lawn?” And I was like, “Yeah, dude, I’ll do whatever you want. I’m down.” I thought that was really funny that he was just really doing such a deep dive. The episode wasn’t even about our characters. It was about mail being stolen. So it was just funny to me, and then we became friends over that.

SANDLER: I like that. You produced it, too, right?
PLAZA: Yeah. I produced it because when I read it, I was like, “I don’t know how I’m going to pull this off. This is dark and fucked up. If I’m going to put myself through this, then I want to have some level of control.”

[…] SANDLER: You’re very tight with your family. Have they seen the movie yet?
PLAZA: My parents saw it. My mom was horrified.