Aubrey Plaza Tells Amy Poehler About the Gorge Inside Her Grief

Aubrey Plaza shows up to Good Hang with her sunglasses on, and Amy Poehler has to ask her to take them off. Plaza obliges, then asks if she can put them back on. This is the whole dynamic in miniature: the deflection, the self-awareness about the deflection, and underneath it, someone who cares enormously and would prefer you not notice. It’s April Ludgate, sure. It’s also just Aubrey Plaza, and this episode earns the right to say so.

The episode exists because Plaza’s husband, filmmaker Jeff Baena, died earlier this year. Poehler doesn’t dance around it. She asks how Plaza is doing within the first few minutes, before they get to anything else, and Plaza answers with the most precise description of active grief you are likely to hear on a podcast this year.

it’s like at all times there’s like a giant like ocean of just awfulness that’s like right there and I can like see it and like sometimes I I just want to like just dive into it and just like be in it and then and then sometimes I just like look at it and then sometimes I’m like I just try to get away from it but it’s always there.

The framework she borrows is from a Miles Teller horror movie called The Gorge, which she watched and recognized immediately as a map of her interior life. It’s a genuinely strange and specific and correct analogy. The monster people are trying to get her like Miles Teller. She delivers this with the flat comic timing of someone who has decided that absurdity is a valid load-bearing wall. Poehler, to her enormous credit, lets it breathe.

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The biographical detour through young Plaza is genuinely fun. She grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, got her first period on stage during Hansel and Gretel as a chorus tree, and discovered comedy when she was cast as the ugly stepsister in Cinderella instead of Cinderella. She wanted Cinderella. She brought down the house with the stepsister.

it taught me like comedy is where it’s at. I was like I’m getting all the laughs. I was like Cinderella sucks.

From there: NYU film school, UCB classes, an SNL internship she got by faxing her resume to every department, and a design-department gig she landed by telling them she had zero interest in design. She wandered 30 Rock with a camera taking continuity photos while the cast rehearsed, presumably haunting the building in the same peripheral, slightly ominous way she would eventually make her career out of. She got herself fired, more or less, by inventing fake historical facts on the NBC page tours. Her explanation for why Conan’s studio was so cold: penguins. In 1956. They forgot to turn the heat back up.

Then Allison Jones sent her to meet Mike Schur and Greg Daniels on the set of The Office. She wore ripped jean shorts to what was functionally a job interview. She got the part. She didn’t know she was getting a part. She had to audition to play herself, which Poehler notes with the obvious observation that there was probably only one person up for the role.

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What this episode does well is let two people who built something together talk about how they actually did it, without the retrospective gloss that usually smooths these conversations into uselessness. Plaza on cracking April Ludgate:

what’s so fun about this character is that like it’s a game of not showing anyone that I really care.

That’s not a new observation about the character, but hearing Plaza say it confirms something: she knew what she was doing from the beginning, even when the writers didn’t. She knocked on Mike Schur’s door to tell him April loved Andy because Andy was so not cool that he was cool. Schur told her to get out. The wedding episode happened anyway, and Plaza cried all day on set, which she denies, and Poehler refuses to let her deny.

They met on a swing set, shooting promos before the rest of the cast had even been assembled. Neither of them remembers it clearly, which Poehler says is the mark of a relationship that actually stuck. There’s something true in that. The people you can’t quite remember meeting are usually the ones who got in before you had your guard up.

Plaza has not rewatched Parks and Recreation. Not once. She’s not entirely sure she knows how. She also confesses she once impersonated the hair department to prank basketball player Chris Bosch, kept the bit going for an excruciating amount of time, and never saw him again. He never knew who she was. She was very much into Chris Bosch. The gorge of that one is smaller but still present.

The episode closes with Plaza talking about her coven of women friends, a group chat called Bombardo, and the specific laughter that comes only from people who’ve known you long enough to tease you correctly. Poehler observes that Plaza’s sense of humor about herself is one of her real qualities, that she takes teasing as a love language. Plaza agrees. Frankie the dog sleeps through the entire thing. The Salem witch trials were fun, apparently. Everyone was freaking out and Plaza was fine.