"I remember, years ago, someone came up to me in a bar and they said, 'My friend wants you to punch him in the face'. And I'm just like... why?"
The answer, in its own way, makes sense: Aubrey Plaza plays mean, and she plays it well. From her Parks and Rec breakout as the nihilistic April Ludgate to her slightly unhinged Ingrid, Plaza's credits include a host of women who have an undercurrent of disconnect – whether from themselves or society's expectations.
"I like that description," Plaza tells Digital Spy. "I'm definitely drawn to complicated characters, but I think I am drawn to characters that are, like misunderstood or that feel like the odd one out. Or something like the underdog?"
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Now in Emily the Criminal, Plaza stretches that familiar muscle in a new direction.
Emily is a character easy for us – the swathes of university debt-saddled American millennial women – to relate to. And yet, Emily is, as the title tells us, a criminal.
This muddled duality, being both underdog and outlaw, is what makes Emily compelling to watch, and for Plaza to play. It may be Plaza's penchant for taking on these kinds of women that has resulted in the prevailing perception of her: that she's just like them.
In preparing to speak to Plaza for Emily the Criminal, four separate people warned that she would be dry, deadpan and awkward, or hard to crack. She was quite the opposite: down to earth, earnest and engaged.
"I think people expect this persona that I portray on TV but actually, I think I'm more shy or more introverted than maybe people would expect. So then I end up just... slipping into this thing that I think people expect from me, because I'm like, 'Well, they all just like want me to be weird so I should just be weird,' right?"
Watch Emily the Criminal on Prime Video
Of course, there is a part of Plaza that is that; the off-kilter energy she imbues into her characters is organic and, she says, "There's a part of me in all of them".
This is where, perhaps, the idea that Plaza as a person is no more than the sum of her parts comes from. "I feel like there was a time when I was on Parks and Rec and right after where it was a little bit hard to get myself out of that box and show people like no, that's not all I can do, you've just been seeing me do it for seven years. It was my job."
It was a good job, one Plaza says she loved and would do again, but spent "a lot of time trying to get out of that". One way she's been able to do so is by moving behind the camera.
"Especially now that I'm producing more, I feel like I've been able to pick more... Just different parts, like this part is probably like the most different I think from things that I've done."
Plaza isn't the kind of producer who simply attaches her name to a film for clout. "Aubrey was actually producing it," writer-director John Patton Ford said. "She knows how to do it. She was like reading budgets! I was really fortunate in that sense."
Emily the Criminal, whose inception was back in 2018 before the current conversation around student loan debt was reignited, has come out at an interesting time. Similarly to Vivarium, the timing was everything. "It was never written to make any kind of like a political statement or anything," Plaza reveals.
Watch Emily the Criminal on iTunes
"And I don't choose parts for any reason than if I think it's going to be an amazing movie and entertaining movie, but [Emily the Criminal] happens to also have this message and point of view."
For Ford, it was always supposed to be a thriller. Structurally, he cites the Thomas Vinterberg film The Hunt – and a particular moment where Mads Mikkelsen's character gets like thrown out of a grocery store, having been beaten up, only to get up and head straight back in.
"I was thinking about great movie midpoints where a character is beginning to change their mind and become more proactive than they were previously."
Emily has a moment of reckoning too. Ford describes it as: "A moment where Emily realises that she has more agency than she thought previously, and the audience also didn't realise she had that much agency."
Plaza draws comparisons to Dustin Hoffman's Straight Time. "You're like, 'Okay, I'm watching this criminal that's like, gonna make good or whatever.' And then at the end of the movie, you're like, 'No, no, he's just a criminal'."
It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that Emily is, well, a criminal. And while we've been, luckily in some ways, saturated lately with unlikeable female characters, it seems more and more that their unlikeability becomes their defining feature, a box-ticking exercise in feminist media.
Instead, Emily is almost an antihero, a character type "usually left for the men," Plaza says. "Really flawed characters... because people are so used to having female characters be likeable or approachable or whatever. And I'm definitely not interested in that."
Presciently, Emily the Criminal wasn't always Emily. Ford revealed that he "initially started writing it with a male character, and it felt really familiar."
Once Ford recentred the story on a woman, "It all became more interesting. It's something that was higher stakes for the woman – for whatever reason – but the real reason is that I began to think about the character herself.
"And just who this individual was, and I began to think less about the gender and just more about who's this person in the universe. I just thought I've never seen this person in a film. Why is that?"
The role wasn't written with Plaza in mind, but serendipity (aka, a mutual friend) landed the script in Plaza's lap. She was drawn to the role because of this inherent moral murkiness.
"You think you're watching someone that's like a victim or victimised. But then you're like, oh, actually, her true nature is actually to make these decisions. To kind of be a f**k-up."
Emily the Criminal likely won't change the preconceptions that some carry about Plaza, because Emily is those things. And counterintuitively, the reason so many may like her and find her relatable is because she's mean at a time when we all want to be mean – even if we can't be.
Which brings us back to Plaza, meanness, and the guy who wanted her to punch him in the face. Because there's a freedom in being mean, cruel even, for women; a vicarious way of living out the rage we often feel but can't express (doubly so for women of colour).
April, Ingrid, Emily – even Riley in Happiest Season, Beth in Life After Beth, or the villain in Legion – all of these women have a core of devilishness we covet.
"They have an inner life brewing. I find that really fun to play. When you have so much going on underneath, but then outwardly you're behaving in an extreme way. Extreme behaviour is really interesting."
This is what Plaza truly shares with the characters she plays. Not the extreme behaviour – the external manifestation of that internal rumination – of meanness, but the inner life that lends itself towards being an interesting and compelling person.
Emily the Criminal is available to rent or buy now from Prime Video, iTunes and other digital platforms.
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Gabriella Geisinger is a freelance film critic and journalist, with a focus on J-drama & film, and the Japanese production industry. She was previously Locations Editor at Screen International and Deputy Movies Editor at Digital Spy. Her writing can also befound in Curzon, 1883, and more. A born and raised New Yorker, she loves coffee and the colour black, obviously.
