Inside Aubrey Plaza And Donald Glover's Relationship
Highlights
- Aubrey Plaza credits Donald Glover for her success after he helped her secure her breakout role in Funny People.
- Plaza's role in the web series The Jeannie Tate Show helped her land a talent agent, thanks to her proactive approach.
- Aubrey Plaza ultimately landed multiple roles that made her famous in a single week, including Parks and Rec.
Aubrey Plaza has credited writer, actor and musician Donald Glover with her success after he helped her secure her 2009 breakout role.
The White Lotus actress first met Glover when they performed together Upright Citizens Brigade in New York. The pair were co-starring in the comedy film Mystery Team when she got the call to audition for Funny People, alongside Seth Rogen and Adam Sandler.
Shortly after graduating from New York University’s film school, Plaza worked odd jobs and did improv comedy in 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 role in the 2007 web series The Jeannie Tate Show. This role helped her land a talent agent. “I just was very proactive and kind of aggressive with her,” Plaza told MovieMaker. “I would just constantly invite her to my shows and constantly try to get her attention. Eventually, she just called me kind of out of nowhere. She was like, ‘I have this audition.’”
How Donald Glover Helped Aubrey Plaza Land Her Breakout Role
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 group of former child detectives who set about solving a grown-up mystery.
She further explains, “I sent it in, and then Allison Jones, who was casting Funny People at the time, who’s like this huge comedy casting director." It led to her being noticed by the director Judd Apatow.
Donald Glover Helped Aubrey Plaza Practice Stand-Up Comedy
Aubrey Plaza further explained how she needed to practice her standup routine because her character was a stand-up comedian. Allison Jones told Plaza that, "‘Judd [Apatow] really likes your tape, but he needs to see you do standup because the character is a standup comedian, and they need to cast someone that does standup.’"
This put the actress in a difficult position as "I was not a standup comedian at the time, but I just decided, Okay, I’m just going to pretend to be a standup comedian."
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 Earned The 3 Roles That Made Her Famous In A Single Week
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 "complete 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.
Was Aubrey Plaza Discovered As A Waitress?
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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