Aubrey Plaza, who has communicated deep pride of her Puerto Rican and Taíno roots (on her father’s side), was named by Time magazine as one of the seventeen Latino Leaders of 2024. Here are excerpts from Eliana Dockterman’s “How Aubrey Plaza Infuses Heritage into Her Characters” (Time).
Aubrey Plaza is having the kind of year that Hollywood publicists dream of. Following her much lauded turn in the hit HBO series The White Lotus, the former Parks and Recreation actor starred in the indie film My Old Ass in which she plays a 39-year-old woman—Plaza turned 40 in June—advising her younger self; she has become a celebrity face of the WNBA right when the league is blowing up; and this fall she will star in both Francis Ford Coppola’s much-talked-about dystopian drama Megalopolis and the Marvel TV series Agatha All Along.
In fact, she wound up filming parts of Megapolis and Agatha All Along at the same time. She cites some vague overlapping themes. In Megalopolis, Coppola’s self-funded opus, Plaza plays a morally bankrupt journalist. In Agatha All Along, she’s a witch. “They’re both villainous characters. But I’m a platinum blonde dripping in diamonds, wearing thousands of dollars of Versace gowns in Megalopolis. And then for Agatha, I’m wearing a jet-black wig with a warrior-style supervillain getup,” Plaza says. “I felt completely insane. I felt like I was ripping a hole in the fabric of the universe and quantum leaping myself to different worlds.”
Still, Plaza took an active role in developing her characters. “I have a different kind of experience than a lot of other Latinx actors because a lot of people don’t even know that I’m half Puerto Rican,” she says. “It’s something that I always like to remind people of and bring to the table.” Before they began filming Megalopolis, Coppola invited his actors to workshop the script, improvise, and even rewrite parts of their characters. And the Agatha team approached Plaza early in the process about joining the show, allowing her to help shape the baddie she’d play. “My journey has been a lot about infusing my heritage into these stories and characters in ways that people might not think to do,” she says, “because people have kind of put Latina characters in such a box.” [. . .]
For full article, see https://time.com/7012289/aubrey-plaza-latino-leaders/
[Photo above by Austin Hargrave.]