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Aubrey Plaza covers Vanity Fair’s Awards Insider supplemental. This is basically supposed to be an Emmys preview, because Plaza got such great reviews for her turn in The White Lotus Season 2. I preferred Season 2 to Season 1, but it had little to do with Plaza and everything to do with those two magnificent Italian actresses, Simona Tobasco and Beatrice Grannò. Personally, I have never been an Aubrey Plaza “fan,” but I’m not a hater either – she’s fine, she has her monotone shtick and she does it well. Except that Plaza wants people to know that she’s more than just a monotone-voiced actress with a dark energy. That’s just acting, she claims. Some highlights from her VF interview:

Plaza hates streaming apps: “I get really angry. I was trying to watch Top Chef season 20. Couldn’t figure out how to f–king get Hulu + Live. I give up! I can’t. I just can’t. And so what I like to do is go on iTunes and buy movies that are old. Or I’ll go on iTunes and just, like, buy the whole Sopranos series, and then my husband will be like, ‘You literally can watch that for free on HBO Max.’”

The deadpan thing: “The deadpan thing wasn’t, like, my thing. I could do it, but it wasn’t like, ‘There goes the deadpan girl.’ I like to think that I’m such a good actor that people just thought that was literally me.”

Her deadpan persona is a defense mechanism: “You can see all the colors of my psychological state on display in any of these [late night] interviews. It’s a struggle for me every time. It’s a struggle to not quote-unquote ‘give people what they want,’ which is—I don’t even know what they want—and try to have fun for myself without coming off like an asshole. I think it all just stems from—I’m scared. I prefer to be a character. I mean, that’s literally what I am doing.”

Her parents: “They’re not in that billionaire world at all…but the idea of coming from nothing and, you know, working your way up—I think that’s why the [White Lotus] character felt very personal to me. I grew up navigating different worlds and different communities where I was like, Oh, now all of a sudden we’re living in a bigger house and a more fancy neighborhood.’ But I always felt like an outsider.”

Puerto Rican father, Irish-Scottish mom: “I feel very much like there’s some kind of ancestral, generational thing going on, just in my DNA. There are a lot of people in my family that are just so creative. It makes me wanna cry. And I got lucky. I have the means to somehow do it. It feels like a weight, almost. Not a bad weight, but like it was meant to be or something. I make so many of them so proud, and it feels personal, because they all had a hand in raising me. Nothing fazes me, I’m very malleable. I grew up around a lot of people pulling me in different directions, but there was an overarching theme of family on both sides. Doesn’t matter who f–ked up or what’s going on. So many crazy things were always happening, but we all have each other’s back at all times. And you know where you came from.”

New York comedy background: “All I was doing when I was living in Queens at that time was just scheming. I always wanted to do dramatic roles. Once I figured out, okay, I can do comedy, I’m funny, I was very calculated about my career. The people I admired most were people like Adam Sandler, who would do broad comedies and also go do Punch-Drunk Love.”

She’s introverted: “I’m way more socially, like, anxious and introverted than people would expect, I think. I’m just as insecure as anybody, and I’m probably way more shy than people think. But obviously the way I deal with that is, like, extreme behaviors… I try to maintain some authenticity, for better or for worse. That’s the goal. If all else fails, at least be authentic.”

When she & Jenna Ortega were called a “Moody, Deadpan Latinas.” “I loved that. That sh-t is important to me, because that’s my whole thing. Even with April Ludgate, it was like, Come on. Sofia Vergara is not the only Latina personality. There’s other ones! A lot of the characters I play, even with White Lotus—it’s important to normalize that there’s all kinds of different Latina people. I mean, all my Puerto Rican cousins are, like, morbid. Morbid sh-t is going on over there!”

[From Vanity Fair]

I think she’s good at the deadpan thing when she has a script, if that makes sense. When there’s purpose and she’s part of an ensemble. But when she’s solo, that persona just reads as someone who gets off on being awkward and unfunny, someone who makes people uncomfortable in the name of comedy. I think that’s why I was never really a fan. But it’s fine, people grow up and figure out different ways of existing and it sounds a lot like she went through a moody goth phase and now she’s looking to show people that she’s a well-adjusted, well-rounded woman.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid and cover courtesy of VF.

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