Ever since her breakthrough role in 2009’s Funny People, critics have tried to define Aubrey Plaza by everything she isn’t. Aubrey Plaza is not the archetypal It Girl or Pretty Young Thing. She’s quirky, but not Zooey Deschanel quirky—she’s ironic, awkward, and always teetering on the line between pulling off a joke and making a genuine scene. Eventually, people just started assuming Plaza actually was the characters she played so convincingly at the outset of her career: deadpan girls who hate people and things.
But in the past few years, Plaza has proven herself more than capable of outgrowing April Ludgate. While other young stars may occasionally experiment with risky projects or unfamiliar genres, Plaza has cycled through wildly divergent roles at an alarming pace. Just this year, audiences can see her in Ingrid Goes West as a social media-obsessed millennial, on Legion playing a part that was written for a 50-year-old man, and in the summer’s most sacrilegious comedy, The Little Hours.
Set in a 14th-century Italian convent, this Jeff Baena-helmed take on The Decameron features an ace comedic cast improvising as horny nuns, drunk priests, and local witches. As an irritable undercover pagan, Plaza steals every scene she’s in, even when she’s mostly covered by a medieval nun’s habit. Her choice bits include a deep-seated, unexplained, frequently violent hatred toward a local gardener, and an uncharacteristic affection for the convent donkey. As The Little Hours careens toward its spectacular final scenes, Plaza’s Sister Fernanda similarly escalates her machinations, plunging the convent’s formerly pious inhabitants into an underworld of queer makeouts, poisonous potions, pagan fertility rituals, and attempted murder. All in all a rich part, particularly for a former Catholic schooler.
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In a phone interview, Plaza talked to The Daily Beast about collaborating again with her boyfriend, director Jeff Baena, and her complete distaste for repeating roles.
So what was your initial understanding of this project, and what made you want to get involved with it?
It was pitched to me as an adaptation of The Decameron, but a dark comedy version where we would all kind of speak in normal modern times. And I knew about the idea very early on, of course, and I’ve worked with Jeff before on all of his movies. I knew that this was an idea that he’d had for a long time, and I just thought that the idea of playing a nun sounded really fun.
And was it always just assumed that you’d be playing the angry nun who’s secretly a witch?
Jeff wrote all of the characters for the actors, mostly, but still based on the story. So he was the one that decided who would play each nun.
I know that the script was mostly improvised.
It was all improv!
Was there anything you specifically brought to the character, an aspect of her personality or backstory that Jeff hadn’t outlined?
No.
None of it?
No. It’s a character.
Right, but if you just looked at her on paper—this sort of inexplicably angry nun who secretly practices witchcraft—it reads like an absurd caricature. How did you go about making her into an actual human?
I approached the character like I do every character that I play—I just try to find kind of whatever the human story is, the journey that they’re going through, and what their motivation is and what they need and want and why they do certain things. I just kind of approach it like that. I have only myself to draw on for inspiration, so every character has some aspects of my own life and personality. But yeah, I just try and treat them like they’re a real human being.
So even when totally inexplicable things were happening in the film, like all of the nuns beating up the gardener, you had a reason worked out for why your character would be doing that?
I had a reason for everything that I did, for sure. Not things that I would necessarily talk about, but yeah… I always have a reason for everything I do.
That’s good.
(Laughs) Yeah.
So it’s interesting to me that this was all improvised, because a lot of the actors in this movie (Dave Franco, Alison Brie, etc.) don’t come from improv backgrounds. Did anyone surprise you with their improv skills, or was particularly fun to do scenes with?
I mean we were actually sort of all in the same boat, because the style of improv for this movie is really different from improv in other movies, especially comedies, because the film is really plot-driven and really stylistic, and it’s sort of all in Jeff’s head, so all of the actors had to work together to figure out what each scene was. I think Fred Armisen’s character was really fun to work with because his character enters halfway through the movie and is kind of calling out all the ridiculous behavior in the situation that we were all in. So doing scenes with him was really fun because he could go off and riff a little more, whereas we were all trying to ground every scene in our characters.
Did you do any really funny bits that didn’t make it into the final cut?
Everything was really done for a reason. There wasn’t too much stuff that was left on the cutting room floor, but it was all really fun and all funny, I think. I mean, just walking around the set and seeing everyone in their costumes was funny enough.
I assume you’ve seen the movie by this point, probably many times.
Yes.
Were there any scenes that struck you differently while watching them than how it felt while shooting them? Like something that you weren’t sure about but ended up being funny onscreen?
I guess shooting all of the scenes where the nuns are attacking the gardener? That scene while we were shooting felt really intense and actually kind of dangerous—we were really lunging at him with dangerous objects. But watching it was so funny and ridiculous, because you’re just like, “Why are they screaming at him? And how could they possibly be so angry at such a poor old man?” So that was a really funny scene to watch later on.
Do you think he was prepared for how intense it got?
I think he had no idea. He was a little terrified. As he should be.
And this film is also your producing debut.
That’s right!
So why did you want to be a producer on this project, and what did that end up looking like?
Well I’ve worked on all of Jeff’s movies, so it felt like sort of a natural next role for me to take on in his third film. And you know, I’m around. And have been since the beginning of the idea. So I’m involved in all parts of pre-production, production, post-production. And Jeff and I collaborate, bounce ideas back and forth, and I have an influence over the casting, and my relationships kind of factor into the casting. And Jeff and I shot the movie in another country, so in a way we were kind of hosting the crew and the cast and kind of keeping the ship afloat.
It’s hard to describe what producers do, exactly… they sort of do everything. They put out fires, they make things work smoothly, it’s all kinds of things that we do. Specifically for me, I did a lot of research for all of the religious services in the film. Like the chapel services, I kind of arranged all of them, and that was just one thing I did. But overall producing is really just about anticipating disasters. And stopping them before they happen.
Were there any disasters? Or did you anticipate all of them?
Well, you know, we were shooting in the middle of nowhere in Tuscany and half of the crew didn’t speak English. So there were a lot of obstacles. And it was a pretty insane shoot, but we managed to pull off.
And I’ve read that you went to Catholic school, so that was probably a helpful perspective that you brought to the project.
Yeah, it’s familiar territory for me. I grew up Catholic and I went to an all-girls Catholic school that had a convent attached to it. So it was familiar territory, and all of that kind of stuff definitely helped, and was an inspiration I guess.
Did it ever feel weird to you that you were playing this absurdist, debauched version of the authority figures that you grew up with?
I didn’t really make that connection, because this story is really not about religion or anything like that. It’s about women in the 14th century, most of whom were forced into being nuns. They weren’t religious. So I didn’t really think, “Oh, I’m playing one of those nuns I grew up around,” or anything like that.
So just this year, you’ve played three really different characters in this, Legion, and Ingrid Goes West—do you see a throughline between these characters? Something that connects them?
I’m always looking to do something different and experiment. I never want to do the same thing. So I think the only throughline is that it’s me… playing them.
