While she’s still perhaps best known for her comedic turn as the sardonic April on “Parks and Recreation,” Aubrey Plaza has been making a name for herself by nimbly crafting bizarre and offbeat characters. She arguably delivers her best performance to date in “Black Bear,” directed by Lawrence Michael Levine (“Wild Canaries,”) which sees the actress having to play multiple versions of the same character. Plaza plays Allison, who says she’s a filmmaker either trying to find inspiration for an upcoming film or simply trying to get escape for a bit – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg in Levine’s dizzying and claustrophobic feature that’s all about what an artist is willing to sacrifice and when work and real-life begin to intersect. Plaza is brilliant in the film alongside her costars Sarah Gadon and Christopher Abbott, who play the couple whose lake house she’s inhabiting at the start of the film.
We spoke to Plaza about how she first met Levine, playing complex characters, and the note in the script that made her both concerned and excited about taking the part.
Mild spoilers ahead.
Has this been a challenging film to promote with how secretive you’re trying to be with plot elements?
Aubrey Plaza: Yeah it’s weird. It’s really hard to talk about. I mean even if I did talk about what’s happening I still think it wouldn’t make a lot of sense. The trailer also kind of hints at what’s happening and I don’t think it gives away anything. There’s a very obvious part two and change that happens though. It’s like “Adaptation” and those types of movies where you know the device that’s happening but you don’t know what the effect is.
I’d read that you, Christopher Abbott, and Sarah Gadon weren’t supposed to talk to one another about the film without your director Lawrence Michael Levine there. Is that true?
I think that’s something that Larry dreamt about. I think that’s what he initially wanted and he had this kind of plan that he wanted to separate us, even physically separate us. We were all living in totally different places and usually when you shoot a small indie movie everyone is lumped together. So there was even a physical, geographical distance happening which I very quickly squashed. I moved the three of us up to a different living situation pretty quickly after the first couple of days, realizing that we weren’t going to survive this. I won’t survive this if I’m living in a cabin by myself, I’ll literally lose my mind and die. It was out of survival.
Did any of that and having to re-situate yourself help put you in the mind space of your character or did the directors want to keep things secretive with the ambiguity of the film?
I think there were a lot of things that were happening off camera that were helpful. We didn’t have much time to rehearse at all so we had these weekend sessions where we would sit with Larry and go over the script and discuss some things. Then we would have these private, individual talks with him so there was this element of mystery happening and an anxiety that was infused into the process because we weren’t rehearsing and we weren’t laying it all out on the table. We were doing it piecemeal. We also shot it chronologically so things were kind of unraveling on and off camera at the same time.
Was it tough not having a lot of rehearsal time considering the dialogue-heavy script? The beginning in particular is so rapidly paced in terms of the back and forth between the three of you? Or does that open up chances for collaboration in the moment?
The script is a really beautifully written, dense script so we were all collectively treating it like a play. Not many people know that Larry started off as a playwright, so I think we all started out with that approach and because we didn’t have that much time there wasn’t a feeling of “oh, let’s mess around and improvise.” It was more like we would discuss the script on the weekends and then we’d just really go for it. It was an extreme acting exercise.
How did you first get involved with the film?
I had known Larry socially and I had seen a movie that he had written with his wife called “Always Shine” that I really liked. Larry and I ended up playing a married couple on a Netflix TV show called “Easy” – it was only five days and it was a comedy so it was very light material – but we got to know each other in that week and it was very clear to me that we were on the same page about a lot of different things and so we hit it off. We’re both in relationships with filmmakers and there were a lot of things we talked about that week. It was a total surprise when a couple of months later Larry called up and said that he’d written this script for me. We went and had coffee and he gave it to me – I was surprised by it. It was an unexpected gift.
Did you know right when you read it that it was a role you wanted to sink your teeth into?
When I read the script I was terrified about playing that part because it was written in such a hyperbolic way. I remember reading a scene towards the end of the script where the description is “and Allison gives the best performance that anyone has ever seen” or something like that and I’m reading it going, “well, I don’t know if I can pull that off.” But there was something very scary about it for me and challenging. I was just shocked that he believed that I could do it honestly. I’m drawn to things that scare me and where I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it.
How daunting is it to play a performer who is, like you said, supposed to be giving the best performance ever? That sounds like high-level stress.
Totally. It’s a mindfuck because you’re essentially playing almost three characters rather than two because in the second act you’re playing the performance part but you’re also playing the person is the actor and then you’re playing the wife. There’s so many levels to it that to me that was the challenge. How do I keep track of all of these things in one body?
Underneath that there’s also what the wife is experiencing bleeding into the performance. There’s the scene we’re talking about towards the end where Allison delivers this huge performance in a pivotal, emotional moment that looks like it was exhausting to shoot. Were you able to separate yourself once you stepped out of the physical scene?
No, it was exhausting. It was awful. It was very painful and the conditions we were shooting in were so challenging. I remember that day that was pushed up in the schedule because of rain so I wasn’t even planning on shooting that scene that day. I was very discombobulated and I think we only got two takes to get that shot because that was the most complicated part of that movie because there’s so many people in that scene. Everyone was on camera so it was a dance to figure out how to shoot something like that so it felt very much like “now or never.” I only had two shots at it really and it was painful. It was mentally and physically exhausting to completely crumble into a ball on the floor over and over again.
You mentioned it was shot in chronological order, how was it going from shooting as a three-person unit between you, Gadon and Abbott, to then immediately opening it up to this much bigger cast? Is it a big shift in terms of how it was performing on set?
It’s totally different and the rest of the cast didn’t show up until right before they began shooting. The three of us were very isolated in the beginning. But I would say that the actors who came to do the second part were so good that it almost felt like they were a part of the crew. It was hard for me to tell at points who was an actor and who was on the crew. Also, we had made some decisions to have some of the actual crew members on camera too so a lot of lines were being blurred at that point. It was all helpful. Lindsay Burge plays the makeup actress in the second half, she’s an incredible actress, and there were times where she was coming up to me, powdering me, and I didn’t even think I just believed she was my makeup artist.
It’s interesting to look at your career and look at a role like this or your character in “Ingrid Goes West” or even Lenny in “Legion” where there seems to be this duality to characters where they aren’t who they appear to be. Is that something that draws you to a character where there is an element to the character that goes way beyond the surface level of who they’re presented to be?
I think so. I think there’s a complexity to those characters that I’m drawn to. For “Legion” I remember when Noah Hawley sat me down and said “I know this sounds kind of weird, but what about the part of Lenny Buskey” and I’m looking at it on the page for the first episode and firstly, the characters are a middle-aged man. He’s a drug addict in a mental institution and he’s just a fuckup. So, you know, sure, I can play that in my sleep. And Noah is going “no, no – he becomes the Shadow King and he becomes the villain of the show” and that’s when I start to get interested. I’m totally drawn to the complexities of a character and the different dimensions they can have because that’s what’s really fun about the work. It’s about peeling back those layers and seeing if you are able to do it.
“Black Bear” is available now in select theaters and VOD.