Aubrey Plaza Covers “Vanity Fair” June 2023 Issue

Aubrey Plaza is featured on the cover of the June 2023 issue of Vanity Fair magazine!

Aubrey Plaza Is a Millennial Dirty Harry in “Emily the Criminal”

Aubrey Plaza’s new film, Emily the Criminal, is the latest reason to take the actor best known for her sly humor seriously. As the action thriller’s titular character—an aspiring artist living in Los Angeles, who’s saddled with $70,000 in student-loan debt and an aggravated-assault conviction that prevents her from landing a decent-paying job—Plaza is riveting. Emily’s fortunes change when her dead-end food-delivery gig leads to work with small-time scammers who use stolen credit card numbers to buy high-end TVs and cars resold on the black market.

“It was very different from anything I’ve ever done,” Plaza says about the “unapologetic” and timely story of a woman “so beaten down by this broken capitalistic system that she’s lost.”

An emboldened Emily taps into her simmering rage and develops a steeliness—mace and a taser help—to take on increasingly complicated criminal endeavors, realizing that she’s got an affinity for the work.

“The story is about Emily coming into herself and getting her power back, and kind of becoming a more fully realized person,” Plaza tells V.F. Indeed, first-time feature film writer-director John Patton Ford—whose own student-loan debt and food-delivery job helped inspire the story—thought of the reinvigorated woman as a millennial Dirty Harry. (Though Emily doesn’t have a catchphrase like Clint Eastwood’s “Go ahead, make my day”—“I wish she had a phrase,” Plaza says—she does have a satisfying face-off with Gina Gershon as a prospective employer.)
“What’s unique about this movie is that when it starts, she’s already well on her way to getting to her tipping point,” Plaza says. (The reason for Emily’s assault conviction is explained late in the film.) “We get to see these kind of micro decisions that [she makes] lead her on this other path. Yes, she does become a criminal. But I think it is more about her discovering who she is, and what she really wants, and what she’s willing to do to get it.” Including a questionable relationship with fellow thief Youcef (Theo Rossi). “I always want a love story,” she says, chuckling. “Even if it’s not so obvious.”