On “The View,” the actress gets into the Halloween spirit, discusses her new children’s book, “The Return of the Christmas Witch,” and shares what it was like to film “The White Lotus” in Sicily.

Aubrey Plaza has received a nomination for the “Outstanding Lead Performance” award at the 2022 Gotham Awards! Aubrey received the nomination for her portrayal of Emily in the movie Emily the Criminal. This year’s ceremony will be held live Monday, November 28th at 7 p.m. at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City.

Aubrey Plaza & John Patton Ford are interviewed for Emily the Criminal. Directed by John Patton Ford the film stars Aubrey Plaza, Theo Rossi, Jonathan Avigdori, Kim Yarbrough. Stefan Pape asks the questions.

Aubrey Plaza and director John Patton Ford on Emily the Criminal, how the film has the sensibility of a tense thriller but is grounded in real social issues of financial deprivation and the stigmatisation of ex-criminals and the highlights and challenges of the shoot alongside Theo Rossi.

“You know Emily’s capable of doing something fucked up,” Aubrey Plaza declares with a mischievous smile. “She’s gone through some shit. But you don’t know what her past is.” Plaza, 38, is enthusing – albeit in her trademark deadpan voice – about Emily the Criminal, a nail-biting thriller that’s a massive departure from her comic roots. Although Plaza gained fame for playing funny people in Parks & Recreation and, well, Funny People, she’s since reinvented herself as one of the sharpest dramatic performers working today. Last year, there were the hallucinatory gear shifts and eye-popping freakouts of Black Bear; now, Aubrey the actor is Emily the criminal.

Written and directed by John Patton Ford, Emily the Criminal stars Plaza as a temp worker with $70,000 of student debt and a felony limiting her career options. Emily’s solution is to be a “dummy shopper”: Youcef (Theo Rossi) gives Emily a fake credit card, she purchases a store item on his behalf, and then she receives cash in hand. When a grift inevitably goes wrong, Emily resorts to violence. “The role was a physical challenge,” Plaza explains. “I worked with a dialect coach. It was a big deal because I’ve never worked like that before.” Emily is, in fact, from Jersey. “I watched a bunch of De Niro movies, did an impression of him, but said the lines in the movie.”

My interview with Plaza is during the London Film Festival, in Soho, less than an hour before her sold-out, career-spanning talk at a nearby cinema. In terms of arthouse features, Plaza’s playfulness slots in seamlessly with the esoteric humour of Whit Stillman and Hal Hartley; elsewhere, she can achieve big laughs, whether it’s in Dirty Grandpa, Scott Pilgrim, or 125 episodes as April Ludgate in Parks & Recreation. Often there’s a pathos behind the droll delivery, especially as Plaza’s characters maintain the demeanour of someone you know in real life – if not you, yourself.

At 20, Plaza suffered an anxiety-related stroke. How much is Emily driven by financial necessity, versus personal issues? “It’s not just that she needs money,” Plaza says, “but she’s drawn to questionable situations. She’s fighting a lot of demons.” What was her way into the character? “The idea of feeling out of place, misunderstood, frustrated, grinding it out, and being treated a certain way. I understood that part of it. Obviously not to the extremes that Emily is experiencing. I haven’t committed credit card fraud.” A comic pause. “Yet.”

Check out Aubrey Plaza on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” from October 26, 2022.

The night before Aubrey Plaza and I met up, she went to the premiere of her latest film, Emily the Criminal, at the London film festival, and was surprised to see an old friend in the audience. It was Aziz Ansari, her co-star on the sitcom Parks and Recreation. “I hadn’t seen him in a really long time, and he lives here now and it was honestly like seeing a family member,” she says, her signature dry monotone belying the warm smile on her face.

What did they talk about?

“I was saying how sometimes I imagine, like, what if my career was happening to April Ludgate, would that be funny?” she says, referring to her supremely cynical-verging-on-nihilistic character on the show. And it is funny, thinking of April, who couldn’t be bothered to answer a phone, now producing and starring in acclaimed indie films like Ingrid Goes West and Emily the Criminal, as Plaza is. Thinking about any of the small-town characters from that star-making show – Tom, Ben, Ron – making it as big as the actors who played them have since (respectively, Ansari, Adam Scott, Nick Offerman) is surreal.

But of all the show’s cast members, it’s Chris Pratt, who played dopey Andy Dwyer, who has had the most unexpected career trajectory, going from doughy unknown to chiselled action star.

“I was joking about this with Aziz. Like, imagine if Chris’s career was happening to Andy. That makes sense now, right? And of course – of course – Andy would end up marrying a Schwarzenegger,” she says, referring to Pratt’s real-life wife, Katherine Schwarzenegger (yes, as in, daughter of).

Today, Plaza is in a London hotel suite, dressed in a camel-coloured short skirt suit with a tan jumper and brown boots. She has just finished filming the wildly awaited second series of The White Lotus, and there is also an upcoming, and slightly improbable, Guy Ritchie film, Operation Fortune, in which she stars alongside Jason Statham and Hugh Grant. And yet, despite all the colour coordination and professional polish, it takes a few moments to not see April Ludgate, the world’s most sarcastic intern, who asked where she got her haircut replied: “Prison.”

This is a common mistake people make with Plaza and she knows she hasn’t helped matters. There are multiple YouTube compilations of her April-like appearances on US talkshows with titles such as “Aubrey Plaza is really WEIRD and AWKWARD. I love it!” Whereas most celebrity appearances on those shows are full of carefully scripted cheese and schmooze, Plaza’s are more in the vein of Andy Kaufman, the late comedian who preferred uncomfortable silences over easy laughs. “I don’t know many people from Delaware,” David Letterman once said to her, after asking where she is from. “Thank you,” Plaza replied with half-held breath, as if taken aback by his comment (Letterman paused and then laughed in surprise). “What’s your red carpet strategy this year?” Conan O’Brien asked her. “I’m just gonna get as drunk as I can and deny, deny, deny,” she replied.

“Each time I think, ‘Just surrender to the process, go with it.’ But I always go off script because I’m desperately trying to have a real moment there and even if it’s uncomfortable, I prefer that to doing something fake. Because that’s what makes me uncomfortable. So I end up doing a character,” she says.

So she’s not naturally like that, gleefully confounding people’s expectations?

“No, I’m a total people pleaser, and it’s something that I’m dealing with in therapy. I think that might come as a surprise to people because they project on to me this disaffected persona. But I totally care what people think, and I wish that I didn’t. I wish I was more like Emily, in fact, and it was really good for me to play that character because it reminded me that I can assert myself, and I can set boundaries and stuff, because I’m really not good at that,” she says.

Aubrey Plaza loves a good witch.

Her faves? Everyone from Angelica Huston’s terrifying turn as the Grand High Witch in The Witches to the most classic screen sorceress of all, Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West from the The Wizard of Oz. But she has a more recent witchy pick. “I’m a really big Hocus Pocus fan so I’m really pumped for the Hocus Pocus sequel,” says Plaza, 38. “Bette Midler as a witch? It’s hard to get better than that.”

Plaza’s affinity for spell-casters crossed over to the page with 2021’s bestselling picture book, The Legend of the Christmas Witch, written with her best friend and creative partner, Dan Murphy. It told the origin tale of Kristtörn and her twin brother Kristoffer, who get separated as children and wind up on very different paths, with Kristoffer eventually becoming Santa Claus and Kristtörn becoming the Christmas Witch. The book ended on a cliffhanger of sorts as Kristtörn fell beneath the ice of the South Pole and lapsed into a deep slumber.

Centuries have passed by the time Kristtörn wakes up in the sequel,The Return of the Christmas Witch (out October 11) but she’s found that her beloved Yuletide has been corrupted by the ghastly Kringle Corporation. Set partially in Plaza and Murphy’s home state of Delaware, Kristtörn eventually reunites with her long-lost brother, who explains how one of his elves betrayed him and sucked all the meaning out of Christmas. The siblings —spoiler alert! — save the holiday, but dangers lie ahead in what Plaza hopes will be the upcoming third book in the series.

Though Return is a sequel, Plaza and Murphy actually had come up with the tale before realizing they needed to write an origin story of Kristtorn and her more famous brother. “We needed to tell the story of how these characters came to be before we launch into what they’re up to in modern times,” says Plaza, who says she and Murphy “very inspired by older Nordic tales, Scandinavian folklore, all the troll stories from Norwegian folk tales and children’s literature.”

Below, the star takes EW’s Pop Culture of My Life quiz and reveals her affinity for Nora Ephron classics, who would attend her dream dinner party, and why co-starring with Michael Imperioli finally got her to binge watch The Sopranos.

Aubrey Plaza has opened up about “weirding out” Robert De Niro when the pair worked together in 2016’s “Dirty Grandpa.”

The actor and producer addressed years of swirling rumors about “being weird” and spoke about her commitment to her films at every stage of the process during a London Film Festival ScreenTalk session hosted by Leigh Singer, ahead of the release of Plaza’s new film “Emily The Criminal”.

Reflecting on her working relationship with the “Raging Bull” actor (the two actors played lovers in Dan Mazer’s gross-out comedy), Plaza clarified that any way De Niro could have been offended by her behavior would have been due to her staying committed to her character.

“I didn’t really have a relationship with him off camera because he’s him,” Plaza said when asked about how well she and De Niro knew each other. “I didn’t have time to get to know him, he shows up in a puff of smoke and there’s no chatting at the water cooler.”

The actor explained how focused she remains when playing character — in that film, as the provocative Lenore — and that any experience De Niro had with her was when she was Lenore. “By the time he’d show up, I’m in character. My character had one goal: To have sex with him. I was acting totally insane as the character because we were about to shoot. I don’t think he understood that wasn’t me. You’d think he would because he’s an actor and an amazing one.”

Plaza said one of her agents “heard Bob’s a little freaked out,” and that later in the shoot De Niro hosted a lunch for the cast and crew and didn’t know who Plaza was as she was no longer in character. “I showed up and he’s like, ‘Who are you sweetheart?’ and after that he was normal. At first I think I came on really strong. I did some questionable things I wouldn’t do anymore.”

The actor went on to discuss her perceived behavior on set and in the media, saying that talk shows “short circuit my brain,” and promising the audience that “having an uncomfortable time is not on purpose.” Plaza, whose background in improv comedy led to her breakout role as April on the beloved sitcom “Parks And Recreation,” said the talk show format is “the opposite of improv” and explained her struggle.

“The worst thing you can do at improv is plan a joke,” she explained. “So talk shows short circuit my brain. Planning a story or a joke feels so wrong to me.” Stressing that her attitude is genuine, she added: “Every time I tell myself just be normal this time. Do it and get out. I see Tom Hanks doing it and I’m like, ‘He’s smiling, he’s doing great.’ I’d rather have an uncomfortable time because it feels more real, but it’s not on purpose. I wouldn’t want to make someone feel uncomfortable. It’s my defence mechanism put on display. I try to do it right every time and fuck it up every time.”

Discussing her love of cinema, Plaza explained that her move into producing came from the desire for “my ideas to matter” when it comes to the influence she had over her characters as an actor. While her first producing credit was on 2017’s “The Little Hours,” she calls social media satire “Ingrid Goes West,” released the same year, her “king of comedy” and breakthrough as a producer.

“I want my opinion to matter contractually — and the fun of it is having control over the parts I get to play. I have really great ideas. It’s nice to get to change the final product and have an effect on it, and I’m just not the kind of person who waits around for the perfect thing to fall into my lap.”

After receiving its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, “Emily The Criminal” was released in the U.S. on Aug. 12 via Vertical Entertainment and Roadside Attractions. The film is screening as part of the BFI London Film Festival’s “Thrill” Strand, before being released nationwide in cinemas later this year. Among her next projects are a role in ensemble satire series “The White Lotus” as well as a part in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” which is yet to begin filming.

Source: Variety

The official trailer for The White Lotus season 2 was released today! Season 2 premieres October 30 on HBO Max.