“Oh, fuck, she’s good,” was filmmaker Ethan Coen’s first thought when he saw Aubrey Plaza in the 2022 thriller Emily the Criminal. His collaborator and wife, Tricia Cooke, with whom he wrote 2024’s Drive-Away Dolls, shared the sentiment. “[We thought,] ‘We’ll order one of that,’” Coen tells Vogue over the phone.
When Coen and Cooke then made their second film together, this summer’s dark comedy Honey Don’t!, they cast Margaret Qualley as Honey O’Donahue, a tough small-town gumshoe. Plaza joined the roster as police officer MG Falcone, Honey’s surly love interest.
“I was like, oh my God, this is my favorite experience I’ve had on set, ever,” Plaza, a lifelong Coen Brothers fan, tells Vogue in a separate phone call. “I just totally fell in love with Ethan and working with him.”
After wrapping, Coen approached Plaza and quietly presented her with another script—this one, for a play. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I will literally read anything or do anything you want me to do,’” remembers Plaza. “I read it that night in my little Airbnb, and I was laughing so hard there were tears coming down my face.”
Let’s Love!, directed by Neil Pepe, opens at the Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theatre on October 15. In it, Plaza plays Susan, a foul-mouthed, romantically embittered 40-year-old at the center of a web of loosely connected one-acts. Plaza describes the play as “a real free-for-all.” A non-exhaustive list of its myriad themes includes horniness, cheating, a Jew with a Hitler kink, vomiting, and anal sex. “They talk about toxic masculinity,” says Plaza. “[Susan is] almost like a version of toxic femininity. It’s really something I’ve never seen before. You don’t get to see a woman sexually harass a man so much these days.”
Coen himself fretted a little over some of the script’s more outrageous moments. “You think, ‘Are people going to be streaming for the lobby?’” he says. “You’d prefer that it worked for the audience. If it doesn’t, fuck them, but it’s more fun if the audience is on board.” Ultimately, he credits Plaza with the fact that, so far, theatergoers have remained seated. “It’s not like just anybody can do that shit. How does she get away with it? It’s because she doesn’t back off, she doesn’t apologize for it, which would be just fatal,” he says.
Let’s Love! is Plaza’s first play since 2023, when she made her New York stage debut opposite Christopher Abbott in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea at the Lucille Lortel. It’s also her first time performing since the death of her husband, Jeff Baena, in January. “It’s really hard to do anything right now,” she says. “I haven’t worked this year, which is really unlike me. I’ve been working nonstop for 15 years. I wanted to be really careful about what I did first, coming out of this kind of period. I felt that it would be good for me to be surrounded by people that I already know and love and trust, like Ethan. There was a comfort in that. My hope for this experience was that there would be laughter and that there would be lightness.”
Her character’s uninhibited nature was part of the draw. “It’s also an outlet for me to be loud and scream and allow myself to physically let loose a little bit, because I historically don’t do that in my personal life,” Plaza says. “I save it for the screen or the stage. It’s very therapeutic for me.”
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Letting loose wasn’t the only invitation Let’s Love! offered Plaza. During the first week of rehearsals, Coen pulled her aside and asked if she played any instruments. Plaza admitted that she’d played the saxophone since childhood, though she hadn’t picked it up recently. “He was like, ‘Oh, that’s great. ‘Cause we’re adding a musical number,’” remembers Plaza. “I was like, ‘Oh God, I didn’t sign up for that.’”
But Plaza rallied, and her fourth-grade saxophone now makes a cameo during the play’s final scene. “I actually need to get it cleaned,” she says. “It’s from, like, 1993. It’s old as fuck. I literally dusted it off.”
Plaza, who hails from Wilmington, Delaware, first moved to New York to attend NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in the early aughts. After many years living in Los Angeles, she’s glad to be back “home,” and rediscovering the city’s eccentricities. “New York is tricky because it’s one of those cities where, if things are going great for you, all of a sudden it becomes this magical place…like, ‘Ooh, I’m in a Nora Ephron rom-com, strolling down the street and what a lovely city.’” Conversely, if things are going badly, “You start to see the rats running around and the garbage piling up and the shit everywhere. And you’re like, ‘What the fuck is wrong with this city?’”
For the time being, though, Plaza is content to stay put. Her family is mostly in Philadelphia and Delaware, and she likes being a mere train ride away. She and Coen also have another project tentatively in the works, one that again involves Qualley and Cooke. Coen says Plaza’s talent is only part of the draw. “I just like her. I mean, your bias is just to work with people you like hanging out with.”
While Coen disavows mining his own work for meaning, Plaza is less reticent. “I think Let’s Love! is deceiving,” she says. “There’s something very deep underneath it. I think it reminds you that we don’t know what we’re doing here. We’re all just trying to figure it out. And that love is really messy and it takes all kinds of forms and it can get really bad or it can get really good. But, ultimately, it’s kind of all we have. It’s kind of like, maybe why we’re here.”
Let’s Love! runs through November 22.