"I totally care what people think"- When Aubrey Plaza opened up about being a "total people pleaser"
With her recent roles, Aubrey Plaza has quickly grabbed the spotlight and remains one of the most trending actors in Hollywood right now. Her latest works, like My Old Ass and Agatha All Along, have made sure that the actress stays on the radar. She has also earned some commendable achievements over the years with roles in The White Lotus and Emily the Criminal.
Though it is fair to say that Aubrey Plaza has risen to the very top of the mountain, the actress admits that she cannot stop being a people pleaser. In an interview from 2022 with The Guardian, the actress opened up about how she always cares about what people think, often to the extreme that she was also seeking therapy at the time.
She told The Guardian:
"No, I’m a total people pleaser, and it’s something that I’m dealing with in therapy. I think that might come as a surprise to people because they project on to me this disaffected persona. But I totally care what people think, and I wish that I didn’t."
She said this ahead of the release of her movie Emily the Criminal, a critically acclaimed and underrated film by John Patton Ford. She expanded, referring to her character in the movie:
"I wish I was more like Emily, in fact, and it was really good for me to play that character because it reminded me that I can assert myself, and I can set boundaries and stuff, because I’m really not good at that."
This seems to be a struggle that a lot of the actress's fans could relate to. She also opened up in the same interview about the portrayal of negative female characters and how everyone is always open to such characters when they are male.
Aubrey Plaza shares her opinion about flawed female characters
As this interview came just before Emily the Criminal, a lot of the discussion centered around the movie. In the movie, Aubrey Plaza plays the role of Emily, a gifted artist who is down on her luck and ends up choosing an illegal way of making money.
However, she talked about the portrayal of flawed female characters and how it is a much bigger taboo than flawed male characters in cinema. She told The Guardian:
"We’re so used to accepting male characters who are unlikable and flawed and we just watch them do their thing. But with female characters, we’re conditioned to analyse them and want them to be likable."
She continued:
"I think it’s cool to normalise the female antihero because women do questionable things, and you still like them. To me, it’s not about likability, it’s about relatability, and if you create a fully fleshed out character, people will see something in it that they relate to."
The element of female antihero she mentioned was present all throughout Emily the Criminal. And Aubrey Plaza played the role to perfection.
Two years from that, hopefully, Plaza has managed to deal with her tendencies of trying to please people before taking care of herself.
Aubrey Plaza has a packed lineup for 2025 and beyond and is soon set to appear in Animal Friends, The Ark and the Aardvark, and Honey Don't!, among others.
