How Aubrey Plaza eye-rolled her way to Hollywood stardom

AUBREY PLAZA had already been cast in one role by Francis Ford Coppola when he asked her to take on another. Standing in an Atlanta gymnasium in late 2022 with the actors in Megalopolis, Coppola’s long-gestating meditation on empires, dreams and cynics, Plaza received her direction.

She would be performing a scene from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, assuming the role of Bottom, the weaver partially transformed into a donkey two acts earlier. In this scene, Bottom tells the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, star-crossed lovers who can speak to each other only through a crack in the wall of their neighboring homes.

Such requests quickly became the norm at “Camp Coppola,” as Plaza calls the week of drama-school exercises the 85-year-old director used to rehearse with his cast. They were preparing for several weeks of filming a movie Coppola had been writing for more than four decades, and he wanted them to swim in the influences that had inspired his cinematic scream for originality.

Plaza’s scene partners reflected several chapters of Hollywood history: Shia LaBeouf, the 38-year-old star of Transformers, and Jon Voight, the 85-year-old star of Midnight Cowboy. Plaza, 40, and her castmates stayed in character throughout the day—meaning that Plaza stayed in her Megalopolis character, a conniving cable-news vixen named Wow Platinum, while playing Shakespeare’s Bottom.

“Stuff of nightmares,” Plaza says now while sitting at a picnic table in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park, her dog lying at her feet.

A scene from a play about the fluid trespassing of worlds, performed by actors who represent conventional fame and new kinds of stardom, proved a fitting assignment for Plaza. She was introduced to most audiences in 2009 as April Ludgate, a character known for her over-it sensibility, on Parks and Recreation, but she has since steadily designed a career that has brought that trademark sensibility to the A-list.

This fall, Plaza’s ubiquity and range will be on display when three projects premiere within weeks of one another. There’s Megalopolis, a big-budget experiment that marks the first return to the big screen by Coppola in 13 years. There’s My Old Ass, a Sundance Film Festival comedy in which a teenager trips on mushrooms and is visited by her older self, a slightly annoyed 39-year-old played by Plaza, who instructs her younger version to wear her retainer and spend time with Mom. And there’s Marvel’s Agatha All Along, a new WandaVision spin-off streaming on Disney+ that features Plaza as an enigmatic witch, thrusting her into the comic-book canon swallowing Hollywood.

Each part helps Plaza build a bridge between the idiosyncrasy that made her a supporting-player scene-stealer—the obvious sense she’d rather be anywhere else—and the leading-actor presence that trades on old-school Tinseltown glamour and star power. Her trademark deadpan delivery has already deepened unexpected roles, such as in 2022’s second season of The White Lotus, in which she played an unhappy wife trapped on a double-date vacation. She seduces like a beach siren, but also delivers lines like “I don’t watch Ted Lasso” in a tone that makes it sound like an accusation if you do.

To her colleague Voight—an actor who’s been around long enough to still refer to movies as “pictures”—Plaza’s appeal is her strangeness on-screen.

“Aubrey was brand-new,” he says. “As with all of the unique ones. When Katharine Hepburn came in, what did she remind you of? You don’t ask that question. You just say, ‘Holy smokes. Look at this.’ ”

A résumé built on strategy and timing finds itself hitting against some implacable realities. Plaza’s highest-profile theatrical release is premiering at a time when Hollywood wonders if the big screen is a 20th-century curio. She’s trying to turn herself into a movie star at a time when an industry—and audiences—question whether that job still exists.

“When I think about movie stars and awards and being at that level, to me, all that means is just control over time and space and people,” she says. “It’s all about the game that is being played, a game of, How can I get to a place where I can be really selective about when I go to work and who I work with, and curate my life?”

She begins saying more about how a great movie can transcend the “noise” of a decaying business model when a man at a nearby bench starts having a conversation with his phone on speaker.

“I still believe that about theatrical, like I think—Oh, God, we’ve got aspeaker-talker,” she says, in one sentence encompassing the former and the future Aubrey Plaza—a deadpan movie star.

THE AMERICAN CITY at the center of Megalopolis is a collapsed, cynical place. The bread is stale, the circus out of town. Decadence abounds: in the nepo babies who snort coke and gyrate to house music until the sun comes up, or in the spacecraft shown crumbling in orbit, all while earthbound humans go hungry.

“When does an empire die?” the movie asks—literally, in a voiceover delivered by Laurence Fishburne. “When its people no longer believe in it.”

The movie’s hero, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), wants to build a city worthy of dreams, with private gardens and mystical moving sidewalks, while the mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), argues that people do not want dreams—they want teachers, jobs, sanitation. Their dueling visions, and the camps of supporters who join each cause, form the core tension of the film. There are also Shakespearean monologues, a subplot featuring the auction of a pop singer’s virginity and more Greek-key design than a Versace trunk sale.

Plaza and her Shakespeare scene partners, Voight and LaBeouf, comprise a complicated love triangle in the film. Wow Platinum starts the story as the mistress to Cesar, who is trying to revolutionize his city, but soon seduces Hamilton Crassus III (Voight), the head of the city’s largest bank and the uncle of an upstart political leader (LaBeouf). In the allegory of Megalopolis, in which the risk-takers led by Cesar challenge the establishment embodied by Hamilton, Plaza’s character most deftly straddles both worlds.

“I loved the name,” Plaza says. “I thought it was very funny.” She watched financial commentator Maria Bartiromo to prepare, and placed Platinum in a lineage of other sexy, conspiratorial characters: Nicole Kidman in To Die For and Faye Dunaway in Network.

Coppola is the most acclaimed director to cast Plaza yet, and there were times on set that she remembers felt different than the dozens of others she has worked on. “Like, ‘This is different. This is history,’ ” she says.

Yet if she needed any reminder of the film’s allegorical parallel to Hollywood, the industry’s response to Coppola’s grand vision provided it. A screening of the film, held for studio executives in March, drew confused responses—and no offers to buy its distribution rights. No studio chief, answering to shareholders, saw much commercial appeal in a $120 million production that features a scene in which two characters debate the proper quotation of a Petrarch maxim.

When Plaza saw the movie for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival this spring, the audience that surrounded her was similarly perplexed. Some critics praised the film’s audacity; others tore it apart—but the movie’s commercial prospects, everyone agreed, were slim. The cast waited weeks without a guarantee that it would be widely shown in U.S. theaters at all. A director on the Mount Rushmore of Hollywood, who twice won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, for The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, left the festival decades later unsure who would play his movie. Lionsgate eventually picked up rights to release it for an undisclosed sum.

For Coppola, it was just another sorry indication of where the entertainment industry’s priorities lie. “The fast-food industry will spend millions of dollars to make a potato chip that you can’t stop eating, and that’s what they want movies to be,” he says. He repeated a phrase as though it were a mantra: “Risk is a part of art.”

Plaza is a romantic too. As a producer on independent movies like Ingrid Goes West, she spurned offers from streaming services in favor of theatrical releases. When asked whose career she wants to emulate, she names Warren Beatty. Every time she walks her dog, she’s reminded of the Hollywood she yearns to conjure. The dog is named Frankie, short for Frances, as in Frances Gumm, the former vaudeville star who went by the name Judy Garland.

UNDER THE DRY DISTANCE, Aubrey Plaza actually is a person who really cares.

As a teenager in Wilmington, Delaware, she cared so much that she organized a peace walk after the September 11 attacks, participated in the Millennium Young People’s Congress and represented Pakistan in the Model United Nations. She won prizes at Ursuline Academy, her Catholic all-girls’ school, in English, theology and history. When she ran for student body president she enlisted staffers on a local Senate campaign to assist with the campaign rollout. She won, twice. She logged more than a thousand hours volunteering with 4-H, a 122-year-old organization founded to teach young people traditional life skills. Plaza participated in competitions that included public speaking, sewing and place setting, for which she learned to organize salad forks and water glasses more fastidiously than the competitor next to her.

“The amount of the community service I did was psychotic,” she says with equal parts nostalgia and self-deprecation. She wasn’t April Ludgate. She was Tracy Flick, the kid hated by the April Ludgates of the world.

“People think I’m a burnout in the back of the class,” she says. “Obviously I drew on my sense of humor, but character-wise? I was nothing like that.”

At NYU, where she studied film and moonlit as an actor, the résumé-building continued: improv classes at night, a Saturday Night Live internship, a role in a production of Rebel Without a Cause before graduation. After moving to Los Angeles, she booked Parks and Recreation the same week she booked a supporting role in Judd Apatow’s Funny People and another in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

The eye-rolling irony of her character on Parks and Recreation, an apathetic assistant with a sharp tongue and happy-go-lucky boyfriend, carried to the screen, helping Plaza inherit the indie-queen mantle forged by Parker Posey in the 1990s. Between 2012 and 2022, hardly a year went by when the Sundance Film Festival didn’t include an Aubrey Plaza picture—she starred in 10 over the course of the decade.

When Parks and Recreation ended in 2015 after seven seasons, Plaza was determined to break out of the sitcom world—and fearful she’d be typecast forever as a variation of April, the ironic chaser to Amy Poehler’s perky shot. Her first major role after the last episode aired was in Dirty Grandpa, a Zac Efron comedy about an attorney who takes his randy grandfather (Robert De Niro) with him on spring break.

“Coming out of playing this deadpan, alt kind of, emo kind of girl, then going and playing this sorority girl who’s on spring break, and whose one objective is to have sex with the dirty grandpa?” she says, a bit like one of her characters, stating the obvious. “It was a slightly different vibe.”

The movie has been called one of the worst of all time, but it accomplished Plaza’s goal: It signaled to Hollywood that she was more than an eye roll. “Everything I’ve done is a calculated move,” she says.

For many audiences, the surprise turn came with Plaza’s performance in The White Lotus, where she again played a character who was over it—but one whose cynicism would transform into plot-shaking action, in this case the loathing-turned-attraction toward her husband’s college buddy.

Plaza was on the set of The White Lotus, in Taormina, Italy, when she received word that Francis Ford Coppola wanted her to audition for the movie he’d been working on since around the time she was born. For an actress who calculates everything, this felt preordained. She and the other cast members were staying in San Domenico Palace, a hotel near where Coppola filmed The Godfather Part II. In the town that surrounded them, Godfather tours bussed fans to the movie’s filming locations, and stores sold Don Corleone–emblazoned tchotchkes. Plaza read the script for Megalopolis in a hotel room featuring its own nod to ancient Rome: a statue of Caesar.

She skipped a birthday dinner for castmate Michael Imperioli to make the Zoom session with Coppola. It was nighttime in Italy, but midafternoon in Los Angeles. Plaza was alone in her hotel room, but Coppola seemed to be joining from a room buzzing with activity. And he was wearing a tuxedo. “I am about to go to the Academy Awards,” he told her.

Coppola knew of Plaza through her work with his son, director Roman Coppola. She had a supporting role in the younger director’s 2013 indie film, A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III. In conceiving of Wow Platinum, he summoned the ancient Roman archetype of the woman who pulls the strings behind the scenes, using her looks to get her way. He did not think today’s audiences would warm to a female character using solely her beauty to advance, so he wanted Wow to seduce as Cleopatra did—not only through looks, but through humor. “They said she could be funny in 14 languages,” Coppola says.

Plaza got the part, and prepared for several months of shooting in Atlanta. Then, like a teenager rushing from AP classes to place-setting competitions, she got word that she’d overbooked herself. There would have to be a few weeks in which she filmed Megalopolis and Agatha All Along at the same time. “Because I’m insane, I said, ‘Sign me up,’ ” she says.

At one moment during the pandemic, among her friends, “it felt like everyone was getting pregnant.”

“I was like, ‘Well, I’m not going to go that route right at the second, so actually I’m just going to go wild and I’m going to go back to work—really go for it,’ ” she says.

But after months on set—first in Atlanta, and then in Bulgaria and then in Albuquerque—she has relished a return to Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, writer and director Jeff Baena. At one point in the conversation, a bird enthusiast stopped to point out a hawk perched overhead, and Plaza recognized it as one that frequents her backyard.

“I’ve seen this hawk before,” she says, pointing toward it with authority.

Little is known about the character Plaza portrays in the highly shrouded Agatha All Along—online speculation has already begun on who this witch might really be. Plaza didn’t expect herself to join the Marvel assembly line but wanted to work with its lead actress, Kathryn Hahn, and wanted to play a witch. WandaVision was among Marvel’s most acclaimed departures from its typical comic-book approach, and Agatha All Along continues that blend of the paranormal and the domestic—in this case, a coven of witches infiltrating suburbia.

Megalopolis and Agatha All Along were shot in proximity to each other, close enough to see one set from the other. In 24 hours Plaza might go from playing Wow Platinum, Machiavellian cable-news anchor, to playing Rio Vidal, comic-book warrior witch. The schedule offered a traversing of an old Hollywood and a new one. While rehearsing for Megalopolis, Coppola had an Elvis impersonator show up unannounced to lunch one day and serenade the group, so Plaza had to figure out how exactly Wow Platinum would respond to an Elvis impersonator interrupting her as she munched on deli meats. The set of Agatha All Along couldn’t compete with such stories. Plaza recalled huge, expensive monitors and Trader Joe’s snacks.

One day, Plaza dressed in her superhero wardrobe: Rio Vidal’s jet-black wig, cape and dagger. She walked back toward Coppola’s set and snuck in—an interloper from one Hollywood visiting the other.

Header video: Olivia Eberstadt for WSJ. Magazine; hair: Mark Townsend; makeup: Raoul Alejandre; manicure: Jolene Brodeur; set design: Whitney Hellesen; production: Connect The Dots.

Write to Erich Schwartzel at erich.schwartzel@wsj.com