Aubrey Plaza has credited writer, actor and musician Donald Glover with her success after he helped her secure her 2009 breakout function.
The White Lotus actress first met Glover once they performed together Upright Citizens Brigade in New York. The pair had been co-starring within the comedy film Mystery Team when she got the call to audition for Funny People, along Seth Rogen and Adam Sandler.
Shortly after graduating from New York University’s film faculty, Plaza labored ordinary jobs and did improv comedy within the Upright Citizen’s Brigade’s basement theater in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood.
That’s how she met Maggie Carey and Liz Cackowski, who gave her the lead function in the 2007 web collection The Jeannie Tate Show. This position helped her land a skill agent. “I just became very proactive and roughly aggressive with her,” Plaza informed MovieMaker. “I'd simply repeatedly invite her to my displays and repeatedly try to get her consideration. Eventually, she simply known as me more or less out of nowhere. She became like, ‘I've this audition.’”
Aubrey Plaza believes, “Everything goes back to Donald Glover for some reason." Plaza was starring alongside Glover in the 2009 comedy Mystery Team when she got the call to audition for Funny People opposite Seth Rogen and Adam Sandler.
The Emily The Criminal star explained to MovieMaker, “Donald actually taped my [Funny People] audition, which is really funny to think about now. He taped me and did Seth Rogen’s lines." Mystery Team, directed by Dan Eckman, follows a bunch of former kid detectives who set about solving a grown-up mystery.
She additional explains, “I sent it in, and then Allison Jones, who was casting Funny People at the time, who’s like this massive comedy casting director." It led to her being noticed by the director Judd Apatow.
Aubrey Plaza additional defined how she needed to practice her standup regimen because her persona turned into a stand-up comedian. Allison Jones informed Plaza that, "‘Judd [Apatow] in reality likes your tape, but he needs to peer you do standup because the personality is a standup comic, and they want to cast somebody that does standup.’"
This put the actress in a difficult position as "I used to be not a standup comedian on the time, but I just made up our minds, Okay, I’m just going to pretend to be a standup comic."
The actress would later ask Donald Glover if she could just perform “five minutes of jokes” at his stand-up show, to which he agreed to. “I sent that tape back just thinking, Oh, maybe they’ll believe I’m a standup. And then they believed it,” she recalled.
After sending in an audition tape and a sample of her stand-up comedy skills, she landed a chemistry read. “I kept making it through these audition levels, and I’m like, ‘I don’t know how I’m doing this. I’m just completely faking this until I make it,” she says. “I flew myself out to L.A. I had no money at the time, but figured out how to get out there.”
Aubrey Plaza auditioned for the three roles that made her famous in a single weekFunny People, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and April Ludgate in Greg Daniels and Mike Schur’s long-running NBC series Parks and Rec.
Although she walked into the Funny People auditions as a "entire unknown," she made a positive impression. “While I was there, Allison Jones was like, ‘Well, while you’re here, can I just send you on a couple other meetings?’ And I was like, ‘Sure, I don’t know what’s going on. Whatever you want, lady,’” Plaza explained.
“And then she sent me to meet Greg Daniels and Mike Schur. They were writing the pilot for Parks and Rec at the time. And then she asked me to audition for Scott Pilgrim.” She luckily landed all three roles.
Plaza was very down to earth about her rise to stardom. “I was in the right place at the right time, because I had no idea what’s going on,” she admits.
“Of course, I went out to L.A. thinking, ‘There’s no way I’m going to get any of this. I’ll probably, maybe have a chance of getting one thing.’ But I got all three of them, and I really think, looking back, it was because I didn’t realize how meaningful or heavy those meetings were. I had no idea. I was wearing jean shorts and not really taking it that seriously and just kind of weird about everything.”
Plaza also tells a story about the first time she met Scott Pilgrim Vs The World director Edgar Wright. “I didn’t realize it was a director’s audition. I thought I was just going in to do a cold read. So I went into that audition, and then it turned out that Edgar Wright was there, and I didn’t even know who he was,” she explained.
“I remember doing the audition and then leaving abruptly, and he was like, ‘Hello? You do realize that I am the director. I’m Edgar Wright.’ And I was like, ‘I didn’t know, I thought you were, like, the casting person.’ I was like, ‘I’m sorry.’” Luckily Plaza and the English director are now good friends.
There was a story at the time that Aubrey Plaza was discovered when she was working as a waitress. This is actually incorrect. In fact, she had recently been fired from her waitressing job when she landed Funny People.
“I was waiting tables at the time, but I had just recently gotten fired because I was always getting fired from restaurants because I just didn’t care,” Aubrey Plaza says. “I just felt like, well, I’m not going to be loyal to any of these establishments because I really want to be an actor, so if they don’t let me go on an audition, I’ll just quit or I just won’t show up, and then they’ll fire me. So it happened very fast, and then my whole life changed basically very fast — like overnight, almost.”
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