“You’re from Philadelphia,” she went on, supplying more back story as she collected an iced coffee at a cafe on the main drag here. The fiction was necessary because Ms. Plaza, a “Parks and Recreation” star, was working nearby, on a movie with a closed set (or at least, closed to reporters). It was the second-to-last day of production, and Ms. Plaza was feeling a little loopy.
“We’re playing hooky,” she said as she strolled around unrecognized with her cast mate Max Greenfield (Schmidt on the Fox series “New Girl”). He was bearded; she was dressed in shorts and a baseball hat. “My character’s a loser, and I’m in character right now,” she explained, straight-faced. They took turns goading each other: “Ugh, I’m so embarrassed already,” he said when she told a meandering story. She borrowed $20 from him to pay for the coffee and pocketed the change.
And when Ms. Plaza returned to the set to have her hair and makeup done, she smoothly picked up the thread of her lie. “Can we get a chair for my cousin Nina?” she asked, and, with an air of familial duty, inquired about “Nina’s” summer.
Having studied comedy since she was a teenager, Ms. Plaza knows how far to take a bit. At 29, she is reaching new career heights, less than a decade after she got a foothold in television as an intern on “Saturday Night Live.” She worked in the art department, despite — or perhaps because of — her clear lack of interest in it. After five seasons as the similarly disaffected onetime intern April Ludgate on “Parks and Rec,” Ms. Plaza has several high-profile films on the horizon in which she stretches from drama to zombie. And for her first leading role, in “The To Do List,” out July 26, she creates what may be a new screen archetype: the randy, brainy, politically savvy teenage girl. She plays a strait-laced high school valedictorian determined to lose her virginity in the summer before college, drafting a YouPorn-worthy sexual checklist in the process. Set in 1993 but presented with a 21st-century feminist point of view, the raunchy coming-of-age comedy is the feature debut of the writer-director Maggie Carey, who developed it with Ms. Plaza in mind.
“The character of Brandy Klark is sort of Aubrey Plaza’s version of Tracy Flick from ‘Election,’ “ Ms. Carey said, especially if Tracy Flick wore skorts and had groping fantasies. She knew Ms. Plaza could handle the R-rated and awkward-teen situations. “You see her in a room or onstage or on set, and she’s not afraid of making someone else uncomfortable,” Ms. Carey said. “But the tension is comedic, and it works. It’s a very specific Aubrey quality.”
They met when both were taking classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade in Chelsea, the comedy theater co-founded by Amy Poehler, star and a producer on “Parks and Recreation.” Ms. Poehler was on “SNL” when Ms. Plaza worked there but heard of her first through Upright Citizens channels, where Ms. Plaza made a name for herself quickly.
Told about the Nina bit, Ms. Poehler gave her signature hooting laugh. “Nobody loves to play pretend more than Plaza,” she said. “She has a really fun and playful sense of imagination.” Compared with April, “Aubrey is goofier.”
But, she added, Ms. Plaza also has tremendous commitment and a healthy sense of competition. (She plays on the “Parks” softball team, alongside her cast mate Nick Offerman and a bunch of crew members.) “Plaza certainly paid her dues,” Ms. Poehler said.
“There’s a fun little dangerous quality about working with her,” she added, “because she’s fearless, and she’s paying attention.”
Ms. Aubrey was hired to play April after a whirlwind week of meetings on her first professional trip to Los Angeles, which also landed her roles in the films “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” with Michael Cera, and “Funny People,” from Judd Apatow. She had just turned 24.
“I remember I wore jean shorts to a lot of my meetings,” Ms. Plaza said. “And I was sleeping on the couch of one of my friends from college.” But she was already an ambitious performer. To get the part in “Funny People,” she began doing stand-up. “The third show I ever did, I followed Adam Sandler in front of a paying audience,” she recalled. She had a Sarah Silverman impression and a bit about what tails celebrities would have if they were animals. “Ben Affleck’s tail, he would have, like, a badger tail,” she mused. “I remember Bill Clinton had a polar bear’s nub.” She considered this for a minute. “That is the worst thing I’ve ever said.”
Her deadpan sensibility made an immediate impression. Mr. Apatow shaped the “Funny People” role around her. Ditto for “Parks and Recreation.” “In our first script, the character was named Aubrey,” said Greg Daniels, who created the show with Michael Schur. Ms. Plaza has a mature take on comedy, he said, geared toward honing small, writerly moments. She’s “a real perfectionist, like Sydney Pollack or something,” he said. “She’s got this super-mature old person’s taste, coming out of a young, attractive person. I don’t know where she got it.”
The oldest of three sisters, Ms. Plaza was raised in Delaware, where her father is a financial adviser, and she watched “SNL” with her mother, a lawyer. “Still, today, she’ll call me after the episodes, telling me what she thought about the sketches,” Ms. Plaza said.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/movies/aubrey-plaza-is-dangerously-funny.html?pagewanted=all