Aubrey Plaza Was the Class Clown — Now, She’s Everyone’s Favorite Criminal (Cover Story)

In The Cards

If she could go to dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?

“Right now, maybe, like, Nicolas Cage,” she says. “I just really am obsessed with Nicolas Cage.”

They can talk both acting and directing. Cage made his directorial debut with 2002’s Sonny, and Plaza also wants to direct a feature.

“I think it’s definitely in the cards for me,” she says. “I’m just a little too precious about it. I have that thing where it’s like, I don’t want it unless it’s perfect, but I have to get over it and do it. … In high school, I was constantly making movies. I was always making dumb little movies, and that’s why I went to film school.”

She has two potential scripts in mind to direct. One that she recently finished writing herself — “that’s a bigger movie, so it’ll be a longer journey,” she says — and another script written by someone else. Both films, if she goes forward with them, would feature her both in front of and behind the camera.

“Eventually, maybe I would direct something that I wasn’t in, but I’m kind of interested in the duality of doing both,” she says.

For her directorial debut, she wants to play someone who reminds her of herself.

“I don’t think I’d be able to direct a movie like Emily the Criminal. If I’m playing a character that’s really, really different from myself and I had to be really in it all the time, I think that would be really hard. But if I’m doing a comedy or a character where I feel like, Okay, I can kind of go back and forth from director roles to that part — then I could do it.”

Emily the Criminal arrives in theaters August 12 from Roadside Attractions.

Main Image: Aubrey Plaza in Emily the Criminal, courtesy of Roadside Attractions / Vertical Entertainment

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