There is nobody in Hollywood quite like Aubrey Plaza. Armed with an elite, weaponized side-eye, a razor-sharp deadpan delivery, and a chaotic public persona that makes late-night talk show hosts visibly sweat, Plaza has spent the last two decades tearing up the traditional actress blueprint.
Whether she is playing a disaffected intern, a desperate criminal, a Marvel supervillain, or a literal cosmic force, she infuses every frame with magnetism.
To celebrate her big day, we rank the 10 definitive performances that prove she is one of the most versatile talents working in modern cinema.
10. Julie Powers in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) / Scott Pilgrim Takes Off (2023)
Plaza was practically genetically engineered to play Edgar Wright’s version of Julie Powers. As the perpetually annoyed, aggressively hostile marketplace manager whose profanity is literally censored by black bars over her mouth, Plaza stole every single scene she was in. She loved the role so much she returned to voice her in the 2023 anime series, proving her signature rage is entirely timeless.
9. Darius Britt in Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)
This lovely, low-budget indie darling was the first movie to prove that Plaza could easily carry a film as a romantic and dramatic leading lady. Playing a cynical magazine intern who goes undercover to investigate a man advertising for a time-travel partner, she balanced her trademark sarcasm with a deeply touching, sweet vulnerability that anchored the entire sci-fi romance.
8. Adult Elliott in My Old Ass (2024)
In this brilliant, Megan Park-directed coming-of-age comedy, a teenager accidentally hallucinates an encounter with her 39-year-old self while on a mushroom trip. Plaza steps in as the older, wiser Elliott, delivering a performance packed with bittersweet regret, sharp humor, and profound emotional weight. It showed off a mature, deeply reflective side to her acting toolkit that left audiences in tears.
7. Wow Platinum in Megalopolis (2024)
Francis Ford Coppola’s polarizing, sprawling sci-fi epic divided critics down the middle, but everyone universally agreed on one thing: Aubrey Plaza understood the assignment perfectly. Playing a fiercely ambitious, gold-digging financial journalist named Wow Platinum, Plaza chewed the scenery with a glorious, unhinged, and theatrical campiness that made her the absolute highlight of the entire multi-million-dollar experiment.
6. Ingrid Thorburn in Ingrid Goes West (2017)
Long before the dangers of social media curation became standard movie fodder, Plaza gave a chilling, brilliant performance as Ingrid, a mentally unstable young woman who moves to Los Angeles to stalk a glamorous lifestyle influencer (Elizabeth Olsen). Plaza expertly balanced the dark comedy of the situation with a tragic, skin-crawling desperation, turning the film into a poignant tragedy about the empty nature of internet validation.
5. Lenny Busker in Legion (2017–2019)
FX’s mind-bending mutant series allowed Plaza to completely shed her reality-based sitcom roots. Originally written for a middle-aged man, showrunner Noah Hawley cast Plaza and allowed her to create an absolute monster. As Lenny—a shifting, parasitic psychic entity living inside the protagonist’s mind—she danced, screamed, and terrorized the screen with a manic, gender-bending, and genuinely nightmarish energy that ranks among the finest comic book performances ever televised.
4. Rio Vidal / Death in Agatha All Along (2024)
Plaza officially entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a velvet cloak and a massive dose of gothic swagger. Playing Rio Vidal, a green witch who is eventually revealed to be the literal cosmic manifestation of Death, Plaza brought a delicious, dangerous, and heavily flirtatious chemistry to her scenes opposite Kathryn Hahn. She made cosmic doom look incredibly cool, earning a massive wave of new fans in the process.
3. Emily Benetto in Emily the Criminal (2022)
Drowning in a mountain of student loan debt and locked out of good jobs due to a minor criminal record, Emily turns to a black-market credit card scam to survive. Plaza, who also produced the film, gave a hyper-intense, gritty, and deeply stressed performance. There are no quirky jokes here; she plays Emily with the raw, feral energy of an animal backed into a corner, creating a modern thriller masterpiece about modern economic exhaustion.
2. Harper Spiller in The White Lotus (2022)
For the second season of Mike White’s hit HBO anthology series, Plaza traveled to Sicily to deliver a career-defining dramatic performance. As Harper, a hyper-analytical, rigid employment lawyer on a luxury vacation with her newly wealthy husband and his toxic friends, Plaza became a pressure cooker of passive-aggressive tension.
Her silent, eye-rolling observations of upper-class hypocrisy were brilliant, and her slow descent into marital paranoia earned her a highly deserved Primetime Emmy nomination.
1. April Ludgate in Parks and Recreation (2009–2015)
There was simply never another option for the number-one spot. Originally auditioning for casting director Allison Jones—who famously told showrunner Greg Daniels, “I just met the weirdest girl I’ve ever seen in my life, you have to put her on your show”—Plaza inspired the creation of Dunder Mifflin’s sister-show icon, April Ludgate.
Over seven spectacular seasons, Plaza turned the deadpan, government-hating, animal-loving intern into a generation-defining pop culture phenomenon. Her journey from a lazy assistant to a dedicated professional, all while maintaining her hilariously dark, dark-cloud exterior, remains a foundational pillar of modern television comedy. It is the definitive role that introduced the world to the glorious, singular genius of Aubrey Plaza.